Raymarine GPS battery

[Alita49DS]

I have a Raymarine GPS receiver which is now about 14 years old. It feeds an RL80c plotter and radar repeater. Which I hate so generally use a much more modern Garmin 751xs mounted by the wheel.

However, the Raymarine GPS also feeds position to the VHF. Which in turn relies on that for the DSC function. So there is a real safety issue if there is no fix.

Now, if I cold start the Raymarine GPS it will, eventually, get a fix. Research tells me that the problem is that the CR2032 battery in the antenna has died. It also tells me that the battery is soldered in and not replaceable.

So, for the sake of a battery costing a few cents one is meant to buy a new GPS for several hundred € or whatever.

How can a manufacturer get away with such deliberate product death?

Before anyone says that the battery is soldered in to ensure good contact consider the fact that my mobile phone has slots and is IP68 water proof/resistent for at least 30 minutes. A lot longer than that antenna on the stern rail is ever going to get dunked. It is also a much more sophisticated device, which includes A GPS, for not a lot more.

What Raymarine has done appears to me to be outrageous.

[hoolie]

It's not just Raymarine, lots of consumer electronics have the same thing. They're usually spot welded which is reliable and a lot cheaper than fancy connector thingies.

[Alita49DS]

Originally Posted by hoolie

It's not just Raymarine, lots of consumer electronics have the same thing. They're usually spot welded which is reliable and a lot cheaper than fancy connector thingies.

Afraid that does not explain the fancy price. Nor the refusal to service the equipment. Instead one has a classic example of built in, literally, obsolescence. With a massive sting in the tail: the excessive price of a new unit. One that has a GPS receiver in it which probably costs no more than a few dollars.

On top of that there is the installation cost for the new unit. One cannot simply connect the cable as it is captive. So the thing has to be threaded through the boat anew.

Therefore, unit plus installation cost upward of 400 £/$/€. Wonderful. Thanks Raymarine for your concern for the customer.

[hellosailor]

I've had a similar problem with backup batteries in the past. Depending on how good your fingers are and how tight the circuit board is, you can often get a CR2032 coin cell HOLDER, solder that on to the board, and then just pop in conventional CR2032 batteries in the future.

Or, you can get a solder-tabbed CR2032, probably from DigiKey or Newark Electronics or Mouser, and replace it exactly. Any electronics repair shop can also do it, but for the price of that labor you can probably buy a whole new GPS.

If you're not aware, never try to solder directly to a lithium coin cell. They tend to get vehemently insulted by the heat.

[RaymondR]

i just Googled CR2032 battery and none of the illustrations show solder or welding tags. Pull the back off the GPS and have a look, you might find the installed battery is already in a clip and easily replaced??

[George DuBose]

I hope this is the right thread for this. Last year, my 2008 Raymarine C120 stopped showing the ship's position and the GPS data page showed that no satellites were being tracked. After finding on the internet suggestions that the 2032 button battery might be dead, sure enough my electrician spent an hour checking all the connections before he opened up the antenna. The battery only needed to be slipped out of its holder, replaced a new battery and the C120 was happy again. No soldering required.

August 2018 the C120 again lost the ship's position. Thinking that last year's battery might be the culprit, I opened the antenna slipped out the old battery, checked the voltage 2.94v, I replaced it with a new 2032 that read 3.3v, but to no avail. Still no ship's position, COG or SOG

The AIS is happily working, sending the ship's "location", how MarineTraffic.com knew the ship's position when I don't is another question.

Raymarine told me last year that they won't even look at their products that are 10 years old. Their chartplotters are now at least 2 generations newer with touch screen technology and a bunch of other bells and whistles that I don't want and would never use.

If I have to go for a new chartplotter, am I going to have to buy a new suite of instruments as well? Is there anyway I can still use my ST60+ instruments with an e-series or Axiom MFD.

Between my Macs and Raymarine, I am getting a nose full of aggravating planned obsolescense. Any electronic wizards out there have any suggestions?

[hellosailor]

There are a lot of subtle things in electronics which are getting confused here. Batteries typically are spot welded, yes. That's because the heat from soldering can damage them. Spot welding is quicker, cheaper, more reliable, and recommended by the battery makers so you don't internally damage the batteries from the heat of soldering.

And if you use a coin battery in a holder? Yes, that is customer friendly. But the holder costs money, soldering it onto the board costs money, and making extra room for that holder costs money and makes a bulkier instrument.

Most of the market just wants small and cute and cheap, so the batteries get tack welded. And that's no problem, you can still easily replace them. Just take a look at YouTube to see how easy it is to tack weld batteries.

Planned obsolescene? No, that's the difference between murder and homicide. The makers aren't PLANNING to make the old instruments obsolete. What they are typically doing is planning for that cheap mass market customer again. If they've got a new product and it costs 1/4 million to support "a" product (trained repair staff, manuals, inventory, spare parts, heating and cooling the store room for all that, on and on) then it is simply good economics to only support one or two platforms--and ORPHAN the old ones.

But that doesn't make them dead, either. It just means that you, the mass market rube that has never bothered to learn engineering and science, need to dig out a means of finding a real electronics repair technician. Now, the problem may well be some obscure IC that the technician can no longer replace, because those get routinely dropped from production as new (and different) ones get made. But the odds are very good that the problem is just something mundane like a cold solder joint, and a REAL technician can find it and fix it in an hour or so.
Ah, there's that problem again. A good technician, who has the skills (including a stereo microscope to view the parts because microelectronics is similar to neurosurgery these days) is going to charge $75 to just look at the board, probably twice that for a lot of fixes. Sometimes well over that. And the mass market just doesn't want to pay--they'd rather get a new prettier model with more features.

Catch-22.

Yes, it would be nice if there were plug-n-play standards (NMEA2000 was supposed to make that happen, sure) but standards rarely happen unless they are mandated. Standards don't help competing companies trap customer business.

It all comes back to the buck.

[RaymondR]

A friend with a business opened an account with a telecom provider which allowed six users each with their own phone and dedicated number to all use the same account. When the phones were delivered there were about ten in the box. When he inquired why so many phones when he only needed six, he was told the extras are your warranty claims. If one quits replace it from the spares and we don't want to hear about it. Such is the modern throw away world.

[ReneJK]

Raystar 120 GPS Battery - How do you unweld (replace the battery) - Raymarine Technical Forum


find someone that repairs consumer electronics and have it replaced , it really is a 5 minute job

[mashenden]

I recently had the Raystar 120 antenna go out on a Raymarine SL70C chartplotter (w radar). I tried the battery replacement but that did not solve the problem. I ended up finding two solutions, as follows:

1) I ordered a replacement (new) GPS antenna from EB . It was about $30, way cheaper than any Raystar replacements if you can even find them. It was called something like "GPS Receiver VCC 12V 4800bps RS232 NMEA"

2) I connected up a Garmin 545 that I had laying around. Connecting the NMEA output of it to the NMEA input of the SL70C also did the trick.

In addition to connecting the power wires and ground wires (not together ) on both the SL70C and the GPS source (antenna or Garmin), I also connected:
a) The Green RX+ wire from the SL70C (or Orange wire if you want to use the other NMEA Channel) to the antenna's Yellow wire (TX) or the Garmin's Blue wire (TX).
b) The Blue (RX-) wire from the SL70C (or Yellow wire if using other NMEA channel) to ground.
c) The shield on the antenna wire is also tied to ground
d) Green (RX) on the antenna is not connected

A couple of things that may save you time: NMEA is 4800 baud (unless dealing with AIS). When testing be sure to be in an area that unquestionably has clear line of sight to the satellites. If not you may start going down rabbit holes with wiring changes when the issue is that the GPS source can't see the satellites.