Heading sensor keeps shutting off

tunaluvr

New member
I have a tzt and tzt 2 set up on my boat as well as the 711C autopilot. While driving my heading sensor keeps shutting off and I have to reboot my network. It goes back on then shuts off again. It'll do that for a while then it works fine. My last trip out I noticed that my autopilot would go off course alot of times and it seems that the heading sensor is the problem.
Any ideas on how to fix or remedy this?
 
It sounds like a the NMEA 2000 bus power is unstable or there is a intermittent cable or connection tee. I don't think I have ever seen a PG700 go bad unless it gets water intrusion. They will lose heading and the heading can get pulled, if the mounted located is bad. It shouldn't be near other wires, motors, pumps, motor fishing reels, big metal. You might try setting up a small NMEA 2000 bus separately from the boat and put it in a clear location and run it for a couple of days. Whenever you say it is shutting off, are you losing all the power lights on the compass? If you lose all lights, it sounds like a power issue. I am assuming the heading source you are talking about is the PG700 flux gate (yet you didn't say).
 
I had a problem with losing the heading data from my SCX-20 satellite compass when I started the engines. I would have to reboot all the electronics after which it all worked fine again. What was surprising is that while it was clear that a temporary voltage drop from the heavy load of starting the Diesel engines was causing the SCX-20 to drop out, none of the other electronics seemed to be affected.

As Johnny suggested, focus on the power supply for your NMEA 2000 network. In my case, the SCX-20 was the at the end of a long cable run mounted up on the tower sunshade over 20 feet from the helm. I installed a second power tap closer to the SCX-20 to reduce the voltage drop, which solved the problem. The root cause of the issue was that my engine starting batteries were starting to go bad and the combiner was engaging and thus the house bank was "helping" start the engines, which dropped the voltage to the electronics.

The surprising part to me was that the network "lost" the SCX-20 permanent once it dropped off even though it quickly restarted and was sending out data. That makes no sense and is different from how other devices behave, For example, if I turn off my AIS transponder, which is a NMEA 2000 device, the AIS data will reappear once it comes back on without the necessity of rebooting the MFD displays.
 
Whats unusual is that the person who installed my electronics told me to try and turn on the master tzt unit first before the txt2 unit. He has the TZT as the master unit and that it shares data. I tried yesterday while fishing and had no problems. But I think I still need to recalibrate the magnetic compass again.
Hopefully thats the fix and wont have any problems again. Time will tell.

On another note. The heading line that in front of the boat icon on the map is off from where Im heading too. How do you fix that or adjust that so it straight in front of the boat? I have never been able to touch my map and have my autopilot go to where it I want it to go.
 
Whenever running TZT series one with TZT2 mixed system, both units should be connected to the 2000 bus. One unit from each series should have the chart master setting turned ON. All units should be connected to both the Ethernet AND the NMEA 2000 bus. TZT series one should be at 6.03 software and TZT2 should be at v6.21 or v6.26. The TZT2 can not run the newer versions of software without breaking compatibility with the TZT series one. He might have you turning on the TZT ON first so that it becomes the data master for the 2000 bus because the pilot was setup to look at that unit as the source. I am glad you seem to be on a good track.
 
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