uncontrolled tracking and anchor alarms

[Mike Two Moons]

Hello:
Before I undertake a complete uninstall/install could anyone offer a suggestion as to why I have started to have the following problems. These situations started last summer on a set-up which had been operating a full season prior, without any problems

1. As shown in the attached screen pic, my tracking log, for some unknown reason, takes a jog to some distant destination. Manual removal of these jaunts disrupts my trip history.

2. The anchor alarm will not turn off. It now engages as soon as I initiate OpenCPN

3. I am unable to set an anchor watch.

System set up:
Open CPN 3.2.2
IBM Thinkpad pentium iii, XP Service pack 3
Furuno 72 GPS
Comea transeiver

I have eyeballed the log file and do not see any indication of any navobj.xml files

Can anyone please suggest what my next step should be?

Thanks .....Mike

[bcn]

Originally Posted by Mike Two Moons

Hello:
Before I undertake a complete uninstall/install could anyone offer a suggestion as to why I have started to have the following problems. These situations started last summer on a set-up which had been operating a full season prior, without any problems

1. As shown in the attached screen pic, my tracking log, for some unknown reason, takes a jog to some distant destination. Manual removal of these jaunts disrupts my trip history.

2. The anchor alarm will not turn off. It now engages as soon as I initiate OpenCPN

3. I am unable to set an anchor watch.

System set up:
Open CPN 3.2.2
IBM Thinkpad pentium iii, XP Service pack 3
Furuno 72 GPS
Comea transeiver

I have eyeballed the log file and do not see any indication of any navobj.xml files

Can anyone please suggest what my next step should be?

Thanks .....Mike

Attachment 97245

Mike,

the jumping looks like a problem with your incoming GPS data. GPS or the transceiver if you use it to multiplex the GPS.

When the position jumps it will trigger an anchor alarm as you are getting out of the watch zone.
To track down the issue you might run the VDR plug-in and find there the NMEA sentences when those jumps happen. Or just a moment with the NMEA Debug Window from the Connection settings.
Publish those.
You might try a different GPS as well.

And consider to upgrade to 4.0 - a lot of improvements

Hubert

[dlymn]

Upgrade to a stable version (some beta versions can behave oddly). Although your pic looks like some sentence instability. Can you borrow a GPS receiver with a different input device (say a hockey puck GPS with USB)?
Work backwards re things that might have caused a change, When did it work well, maybe a system restore to before that date might help, but don't forget that this might cause you to lose stuff.
Any changes to the power supply? Some equipment injects instability into the power system. Any gear added? Any wetting of the wires especially with salt water that might encourage corrosion.
So step back bit by bit to when it worked well. If it never woked well then it might be faulty equipment.

[Mike Two Moons]

I think I will try the version upgrade first. I will uninstall and download a newer version.

I am away from the boat until late spring, so I won't know the results until then.

I didn't mention that the anchor alarm is consistent - even when not connected to any GPS or AIS device.

The set up worked fine for one season and then started to act up.
Upon returning to the boat, I will examine all wiring for the GPS and AIS.

Thanks.....Mike

[dlymn]

Just before you update delete any opencpn residual data. A new version might continue misbehaving if it can access your old files. Bye bye waypoints etc.

[Mike Two Moons]

Hi:
I have uninstalled and upgraded to CPN 4.0.0.

Contrary to what you have suggested (I did this before your last email) I cleaned up the wayward tracks before exporting/importing into the version 4.0.0.

The constant bell ringing has stopped. However I still get the odd 4 bells for no explicable reason. A search of my waypoints has not yielded any outstanding anchor watch.

Until I can reconnect to a GPS, I don't forsee any further checks I can make.

Question - under Options>User Interface there is an interface option "play ships bells" Do you know if this is bells on/bells off selection for danger alarm, anchor watch sounding or does it infer something else? I didn't finally reference in the user notes.

Thanks again....Mike

[nohal]

Originally Posted by Mike Two Moons

The constant bell ringing has stopped. However I still get the odd 4 bells for no explicable reason. A search of my waypoints has not yielded any outstanding anchor watch.

Question - under Options>User Interface there is an interface option "play ships bells" Do you know if this is bells on/bells off selection for danger alarm, anchor watch sounding or does it infer something else? I didn't finally reference in the user notes.

Ship's bells are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship%27s_bell - nothing to do with any alarms.

Pavel

[dlymn]

Yep. You've turned on ship's bells and you'll get a bell according to the traditional bell rings. You know "6 bells and all is well"

Turn that off and it should stop ringing

You can pick up a GPS puck off ebay- not cheap, but they work well. This will keep your laptop independent of your main system and this is not a bad idea. redundancy is a good thing in navigation

[bobofthenorth]

I'm not sure what GPS input you are using or even if it would matter. We did however have exactly the same behaviour for a while and it was due to bad grounding on the USB ports on our nav computer. Once I got that cleaned up all that behaviour went away but while it was occurring it was pretty alarming, particularly if the computer was doing the navigating.

In our case we had a series of USB ports pressed into a plastic case that were supposed to obtain their grounds from a flimsy SS spring affair. There must have been some trace corrosion on that SS or else it just wasn't pressed hard enough but it was clearly the problem because when I cleaned it up, bent it to apply additional pressure and coated it liberally with coppercoat neverseize the problem completely disappeared. You could probably troubleshoot that by applying an external ground from the USB cable to the computer case but that's just a WAG. I took mine apart, couldn't see anything else wrong so I started bending things until they worked again. Its not a good troubleshooting method I know but its the one I've used for over 50 years so I'm not likely to change now.

[Mike Two Moons]

Thanks for all the input.

Bob - did you experience both conditions that I posted - uncontrolled tracking and inability to set anchor watch because of the constant sounding alarms?

I have stuck with a dedicated IBM Thinkpad because it has a 9pin Dsub serial connector which is hard wired into a Furuno GPS. I am trying to avoid use of serial-usb connectors simply because of the connectivity problems inherent in their use.

But I will be reviewing all wiring in the set-up when we return to the boat in May.

Mike

[bobofthenorth]

I don't use the OpenCPN anchor alarm so I don't know if that would have been a problem. The tracking looks identical to what we experienced.