VX2 won't boot - screen & keypad blink

[Anonymous]

When powering on my VX2 RDP148 I get 2 beeps, followed by the Furuno boat splash screen and then instead of the usual navigation caution, the keypad lights blink once alternating with the screen flashing, back and forth, continuously. The unit seems to freeze in this state.

At first the SIM box showed up at the bottom of the screen (which is otherwise blank) but after finding the choices of ALARM+PWR and CLEAR+PWR that seems to have disappeared. But unit still doesn't power up and go into chart mode.

Is there some other keystroke sequence I can use to do a 'soft reset''? (I suspect I may have brought this on myself by choosing (for the first time!) the Simulation mode as I was curious what that looked like. I'm guessing (??) that I was stuck in simulation mode and don't know how to get out of it?

 

[Anonymous]

The resets that are available are the alarm-pwr and clear-pwr sequence you mentioned. Changing to simulation mode wouldn't cause the problem you described. It appears that there might be a power problem. First, I'd try removing the chart card and turn it on. If it comes on, the chart card or chart card reader is bad which would cause a short; the NAVnet system has and over/under voltage and over/under amperage protection and would shut off to protect itself. If that doesn't fix it, try disconnecting all cables except the power cable and turn it on. If it works fine that way, turn the NN off and plug back in one cable at a time and turn on after each one. When you come to one that causes the unit to act strangely, then that's the one causing the problem. Let me know how that works out.

 

[Anonymous]

Yup -- power it was. Unsteady feed from the battery. Switched batteries and Furuno is now back to working perfectly. Well almost perfectly.... because I had done the ALM+PWR and CLR+PWR key sequences, now that the unit is powering up perfectly I'm needing to explore tons of menus to get everything reconfigured... but this is proving to be a very useful learning experience as to what all the menu settings do, which NMEA sentences I need to enable, etc. I fear I might be back with more questions/problems. but for the moment I'm happily able to view the chart again! Many thanks.