Raymarine wind instruments failure in strong winds

[CatNewBee]

In squalls and strong winds above 20kn and waves the wind data ceases often to be provided by the wind vane and the ITC-5, only a hard reboot by power reset brings them back online. This is very annoying because you loose wind speed information essential for reefing decisions on a catamaran. Wenplan ocean passages and want to add redundancy on critical systems, wind and autopilot are critical for shorthanded crews, i guess.

So I am thinking about installing a second wind instrument and hooking up to the network.
There are self powered wireless mast head units nowadays on the market, any comments or reviews on them? Also raymarine has bought tackticks and offeres a wireless wind vane now, but I am thinking about a complete different sensor, like the unfortunately dicontinued maretron ultrasonic head unit with no mechanical parts. Would be great to have something bird proof.

Any suggestions for a good complementary system that hooks up to n2k hopefully without running new cables to the top?

[CatNewBee]

Finally found some time to dig a little deeper. One thing seemed to fix the issue, the sensor contacts in the ITC-5.

But the solution was temporary. In the marina they eventually fail again with no reason.

So I started tracking down the error by checking the connectors on the backbone - no issues. Then made a test cable from a spur cable and a multimeter. Surprisingly the bus shows a little over 11V, having LFP batteries with constant 13.4V at the terminals and 12.65V at the instruments switch panel this was not acceptable. Started to track down and search for the power injector - and found none.

There was no information on the net about the bus routing inside the vessel, no documentation.

Finally found the terminators of the backbone, one is at the SPx30 in the port engine locker, the other at the DST200 depth sounder port forward cabin bilge.

To make it short, the bus is powered by the SPx30 and it delivers only about 11V. The SPx30 power supply has 12.65V on the terminals. Switched the power to the backbone off and added a dedicated power injector cable in the middle of the backbone at the main power panel next to the chart table. Now the bus has 12.6V everywhere and all devices run stable again.

Hope this helps somebody with similar trouble.