ACR AIS malfunction

[chuckr]

we have a ACR Nauticast B AIS - that has served us well sailing the entire carib and across the atlantic and part of the med -- and into our winter home in Tunisia

about 2 months we turned on all our electronics and everything worked - then just out of the blue the AIS stopped picking up a gps signal -- we turned everything off and on again - no help -- it simply is not getting a gps signal --

i tried to look at the internal of the gps unit thinking salt may have gotten in but it is a sealed unit --
i did check all the connections and even had an electrican on board to check the connections - could not find anything not connected or misconnected

by the way the nauticast feeds gps data and ais data into a raymarine c70

does anyone have a Nauticast that has had a similar problem -- if so how was it fixed?

thanks

[Ziggy]

If the GPS uses a standard NMEA0183 interface, you could test the GPS and the AIS unit separately -- hook up the gps to a laptop via a serial interface and see if it works, and hook up a known good gps receiver to the ais unit and see if that works.

[kmaz]

Download ProAIS2 and connect the AIS unit to your laptop via the USB port. This will allow you to see if the GPS is seeing satellites. If it is, you will be able to see the NMEA sentences generated.

[smac999]

^this. I've never seen the acr one. but all other transmitting ais's come with computer programming software and you'll see satellite strength and info.