Symptoms of imminent failure of Raymarine masthead unit.

[GILow]

Hi all,

I thought it would be worth sharing this one in case it helps others with the diagnostic process.

I have a suite of Raymarine ST60+ instruments on the boat. For the last couple of years the wind direction indicator has been behaving erratically. Symptoms included only showing wind directions from the port side and sometimes not being detected by the display head at power up.

I discovered, through trial and error, that performing a factory reset on the display unit would solve the problem. As time went on the time between needing to reset the unit decreased from once every few weeks, to every few days to daily. Toward the end I also found that sometimes I needed multiple resets to get it going again.

Anyway, a month or so back it stopped responding to any number of resets. I followed the Raymarine process of voltage measurements (very easy to do) and concluded it was dead from the flatline 8 volts across all pairs.

I’ve replaced the sender with a new unit and all is working well now without the need to reset anything. I’ll get the old unit refurbished and put it in the spares.

So if you see the symptoms I describe above, chances are your masthead sender is on its way out and it’s time to start budgeting for a replacement or repair.