Could anyone comment on their experience with the raymarine RL80CRC?

"rlojmo" wrote in news:1172516760.374755.127670
@a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com:

Could anyone comment on their experience with the raymarine RL80CRC?



Just the display or with a radar dome? We have an RL70CRC, which is
close, with the awful 2KW radome.....

We've been through 3 2KW radomes because they suck in humid air all night
through the little rubber drain tit on the bottom and it rains INSIDE the
radome, which isn't sealed like it should be (cheap). Then, the water
inside vaporizes into a bog in the sun all day, eating the cheap pot
metal the whole radar chassis is made of. It turns into a conductive
white metal salt that eventually shorts out the unprotected PC boards
inside the pot metal box because it has gaping holes in it to run control
wires to cheap compression spring contacts, that corrode of course, too.
Even the soft iron core of the unprotected magnetron rusts heavily,
causing the maggie's magnetic power to short out as the core makes
contact between the laminations. We've never let it get so bad it arcs
before, once again, replacing this piece of marine consumer crap with,
yet, another one.

4 screws doesn't seal the radome top to the base. The guts look just
awful after a year at sea.....how stupid. It's not a Raytheon.

It's almost time to replace it again, before we're at sea with a dead
radar, yet again. Thanks for reminding me to haul it down for another
inspection.

Larry
--
I have a new strategy to protect the Mexican border. From the border
to inside the USA, 1 mile, we turn it into our OPEN PIT nuclear
waste dump, turning it into a no-mans-land for tens of thousands
of years. Anyone attempting to cross will simply be eaten alive
by neutrons! Problem solved!

"rlojmo" wrote in news:1172516760.374755.127670
@a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com:

Could anyone comment on their experience with the raymarine RL80CRC?



One other comment, if you get the crazy idea to add the "Smart Heading
Sensor" in hopes of getting rate of turn information out of it for you
autopilot, DON'T. It's useless, a waste of $900. It's NOT a gyroscope.

http://raymarine.com/raymarine/Produ...ion=2&page=389
&product_id=699

Larry
--
I have a new strategy to protect the Mexican border. From the border
to inside the USA, 1 mile, we turn it into our OPEN PIT nuclear
waste dump, turning it into a no-mans-land for tens of thousands
of years. Anyone attempting to cross will simply be eaten alive
by neutrons! Problem solved!

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"rlojmo" wrote in news:1172516760.374755.127670
@a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com:

Could anyone comment on their experience with the raymarine RL80CRC?

One other comment, if you get the crazy idea to add the "Smart Heading
Sensor" in hopes of getting rate of turn information out of it for you
autopilot, DON'T. It's useless, a waste of $900. It's NOT a gyroscope.

I've got the RL80CRC at the helm, and the RL70CRC at the navstation. They
have worked well for me for several years, but last summer the RL70 started
to spontaneously reset, apparently caused by the high temperatures in
Hawaii. It had previously been to Hawaii and back, under similar
conditions, with no problem. I expect even good stuff to occasionally
break, so this isn't necessarily all that terrible, but this series is no
longer in production. Raymarine says thay can repair it, but since it works
OK in the cooler northern California climate I will probably leave it alone
until I replace the whole setup with something newer. Of course, I will
have to replace my Raymarine radar in order to interface it to the newest
Raymarine E-series chartplotters. For what it's worth, my Raymarine 4KW
radar has been a solid performer for the last five years.

Here's what I like about the RL70/80CRC:
- Works fine as a chartplotter
- Flexible radar display: separate window, split-screen, or chart overlay
- Radar MARPA is nice to have, and actually works pretty well
- The display works well in daylight, and dims well for night use.

Issues:
- Obsolete, no feature enhancements in the future (will never support AIS)
- Uses CMAP chart chips, which are good, but the new Raymarine gear uses
Navionics charts instead
- Sharing waypoints between the networked units, or an attached PC, is
difficult (for me) to make work well
- Doesn't recognize the NMEA output from my B&G wind instruments (it expects
a different NMEA wind message). My other NMEA inputs are recognized.

By the way, the Smart Heading Sensor significantly improves the performance
of of the MARPA function, and some radar display modes. Without it the
radar loses target-lock if the boat is yawing around. I haven't tried to
feed my autopilot with the Smart Heading Sensor, but the outputs (Heading
and Rate Of Turn) are supposed to help the performance of the more advanced
autopilots. I don't think that anyone really uses a true gyro for this
application (on a sailboat, anyway).

My advice is to make sure that the RL80CRC does what you want. You won't be
able to upgrade, and support will probably become an issue. A newer unit
will be a better long-term solution, but you should be able to get the
RL80CRC at a significant discount. Regardless, planned (or unplanned)
obsolescence seems to be the way of the world, so I don't expect even the
newest units to be a permanent solution -- there will eventually be a new
feature that I really want to have. A PC-based system has some big
advantages in this regard, but the disadvantages are still too great for me
to jump on that bandwagon just yet.

-Paul

"Paul" wrote in
:

Issues:
- Obsolete, no feature enhancements in the future (will never support
AIS) - Uses CMAP chart chips, which are good, but the new Raymarine
gear uses Navionics charts instead

All part of the marketing. The Garmin GPSMAP 185 sitting next to it
can't even get a new chart any more. We're forced to replace all
electronics every 3-5 years, no matter what it costs. It's a travesty.

- Sharing waypoints between the networked units, or an attached PC, is
difficult (for me) to make work well

Make sure the waypoint statements are turned on in the RLs. I had some
troubles because many of the damned statements were defaulted OFF from
the factory. There's a menu choice buried in there that lists them all.

- Doesn't recognize the NMEA output from my B&G wind instruments (it
expects a different NMEA wind message). My other NMEA inputs are
recognized.


Which B&G do you have. Lionheart came with B&G "Network" instruments,
which are just a daisy-chained NMEA0183 system, so we stuck with the
obsolete equipment, adding Network Pilot, Network Depth, Network Data
(repeater at the nav station) to what was there. Of course, now, none of
the new B&G instruments are NMEA compatible with new proprietary
crapware. With Network instruments, you pick out the red data wire from
any cable in the loop and all the statements from all the Network
instruments plugged into the loop are all right at your disposal.

We find that the compass sensor for B&G Network Pilot is a MUCH better
NMEA compass than either the Raymarine compass sensor or the Smart
Heading Sensor. It just shows as more stable, even though it's mounted
about 3' from the Raymarine compass sensor. Network Pilot running off
Network Wind offshore makes a dandy wind vane steering device for night
runs in the rain. We build what looks like a miniature trailer hitch of
a bellcrank on the rudder post in the aft cabin under the bunk to hook
Pilot's electrohydraulic actuator to. If the rudder doesn't fall out,
we'll have steering..(c; The Pilot's learning algorithms make beautiful
turns after it stores the boat's characteristics for a while.

We don't navigate from the Raymarine's old charts. We use The Cap'n on a
Dell Latitude laptop, which now has an SR-162 AIS receiver plugged into a
Radio Shack RS-232C to USB adapter cable to feed it AIS data. It drives
the B&G Pilot through a Noland multiplexer. Backup is the boards I
salvaged from a portable Yeoman plotting board my captain left in his
pickup truck in the sun in Atlanta. All the foam glue turned to jelly
and he was about to toss it in the trash. I took the boards out and
mounted them with industrial double-sided tape to the bottom of the
Amel's mahogany chart table lift top. Yeoman's signal to its puck works
fantastic through 1/2" of mahogany and the whole Maptech chart books just
folded over to put the chart we want on top. A velum sheet lets us plot
by hand in case of massive electronic failure using the Yeoman's puck
every hour over the chart book. The Yeoman can feed waypoints to The
Cap'n and Pilot as well as anything.

My captain loves all the toys....(c; He hands me new boxes and says,
"Can you make this work on our system?"....usually as he's headed out the
hatch to get out of the way. Gotta love him....(c;


Larry

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Paul" wrote in
:

Issues:
- Obsolete, no feature enhancements in the future (will never support
AIS) - Uses CMAP chart chips, which are good, but the new Raymarine
gear uses Navionics charts instead

All part of the marketing. The Garmin GPSMAP 185 sitting next to it
can't even get a new chart any more. We're forced to replace all
electronics every 3-5 years, no matter what it costs. It's a travesty.

I can still get the Cmap chart updates, and would happily stick with the
RLC80 for a bit longer, but given the "reset" problem with the current
chartplotter I am ready to upgrade rather than repair an obsolete (but
functional) system. I suppose the reason that I haven't already swapped in
the new Raymarine E-series is that I'm waiting for the first generation of
new-system bugs and important upgrades to be settled. That, and the hassle
of pulling new cables from the mast and helm to the navstation. Soon,
though.

I'm not married to Raymarine, but do want to get gear that networks well,
and I've grown comfortable with Raymarine. I'm trying to keep an open mind,
though.

- Sharing waypoints between the networked units, or an attached PC, is
difficult (for me) to make work well

Make sure the waypoint statements are turned on in the RLs. I had some
troubles because many of the damned statements were defaulted OFF from
the factory. There's a menu choice buried in there that lists them all.

My problem is that waypoints entered at the helm (for example) don't always
show up at the navstation, or if they do show up I can't "go to" them.
Also, waypoints on the PC (using Raytech software) don't co-exist nicely
with waypoints entered at the chartplotter. I will definitely look into the
waypoint statement options. I don't feed the waypoints to the autopilot, so
this issue is merely an annoyance.

- Doesn't recognize the NMEA output from my B&G wind instruments (it
expects a different NMEA wind message). My other NMEA inputs are
recognized.

Which B&G do you have. Lionheart came with B&G "Network" instruments,
which are just a daisy-chained NMEA0183 system, so we stuck with the
obsolete equipment, adding Network Pilot, Network Depth, Network Data
(repeater at the nav station) to what was there.

I also have the "Network" instruments: Wind, Depth, Speed, and Pilot at the
helm, and the "Data" repeater at the navstation. I've got the B&G
electric/hydraulic ram at the rudderpost, and it has been a solid performer.
All the B&G NMEA data is run through a Seatalk converter into the
Chartplotter, it's just that the Chartplotter is expecting a different NMEA
Wind message -- there are two types and the B&G sends the wrong one (for the
Raymarine unit). I also run NMEA from the B&G, and from the Raymarine gear,
into a Shipmodul Bluetooth multiplexer, which feeds the Pocket PC program I
have previously mentioned. I have seen a NMEA mux that can convert between
different NMEA variants, but this isn't important enough for me to mess with
(especially as I plan to do a major upgrade, and expect that I will then
have to solve a totally different set of incompatibilities).

Of course, now, none of
the new B&G instruments are NMEA compatible with new proprietary
crapware. With Network instruments, you pick out the red data wire from
any cable in the loop and all the statements from all the Network
instruments plugged into the loop are all right at your disposal.

Every now and then I consider putting in the latest stuff from B&G to
replace the "Network" units, but the old stuff is still going strong. B&G
claims that their new autopilot has better performance, and the new Wind
gear can be more accurately calibrated, and they probably are better, but
what I've got seems to do the job. Perhaps if VALIS were an "Open 60" racer
I would care more about this, but my needs are really pretty modest in this
department. Most of the time at sea I'm using the Monitor windvane, anyway.
Some of the B&G accessories do look nice, though (such as the wireless
remote). Of course, the Raymarine Depth, Speed, Pilot, etc, also look like
they would suit me. I am paralyzed with indecision -- too many choices, not
enough obviously correct answers!

We find that the compass sensor for B&G Network Pilot is a MUCH better
NMEA compass than either the Raymarine compass sensor or the Smart
Heading Sensor. It just shows as more stable, even though it's mounted
about 3' from the Raymarine compass sensor. Network Pilot running off
Network Wind offshore makes a dandy wind vane steering device for night
runs in the rain. We build what looks like a miniature trailer hitch of
a bellcrank on the rudder post in the aft cabin under the bunk to hook
Pilot's electrohydraulic actuator to. If the rudder doesn't fall out,
we'll have steering..(c; The Pilot's learning algorithms make beautiful
turns after it stores the boat's characteristics for a while.

I wonder if the difference in compass response is due to heavier (slower)
filtering on the B&G compass? My Raymarine Smart Heading Sensor is just
used to feed the Chartplotter, to make MARPA more usable. I have a B&G
compass that feeds the autopilot. I like to think that in a pinch I could
patch around a broken compass using the working one, but I haven't tried
doing this. I am not feeding any of the Raymarine NMEA waypoints into the
B&G Pilot, I just steer to compass or wind. I claim that I don't want to
compromise the reliability by interconnecting all this gear, but the truth
is that I'm just too lazy to connect them together. It works fine the way
it is, though.

We don't navigate from the Raymarine's old charts. We use The Cap'n on a
Dell Latitude laptop, which now has an SR-162 AIS receiver plugged into a
Radio Shack RS-232C to USB adapter cable to feed it AIS data. It drives
the B&G Pilot through a Noland multiplexer. Backup is the boards I
salvaged from a portable Yeoman plotting board my captain left in his
pickup truck in the sun in Atlanta. All the foam glue turned to jelly
and he was about to toss it in the trash. I took the boards out and
mounted them with industrial double-sided tape to the bottom of the
Amel's mahogany chart table lift top. Yeoman's signal to its puck works
fantastic through 1/2" of mahogany and the whole Maptech chart books just
folded over to put the chart we want on top. A velum sheet lets us plot
by hand in case of massive electronic failure using the Yeoman's puck
every hour over the chart book. The Yeoman can feed waypoints to The
Cap'n and Pilot as well as anything.

I do my planning and weather routing on the laptop, usually using Raytech
Navigator, and only use the Chartplotter for approach and harbor situations.
I carry a good set of charts, but I typically don't use them. I log my
position, course, and speed, in the logbook every few hours, and consider
this my dead-reckoning backup should the electronics give out. My Pocket PC
"Black Box" software also logs this data (and everything else), so I've got
multiple ways of starting up a dead reckoning track if necessary. I did use
the paper chart last summer when we were entering Kaneohe Bay (in Oahu), as
my electronic charts were out of date and they had recently moved some
channel markers. Kaneohe is full of narrow channels and coral heads, so
having the current paper chart kept me out of trouble.

The navstation chartplotter does run 24/7 in order to feed my PocketPC AIS
and "black box" software. It is also nice to see our projected course line
on the chartplotter screen pointing in approximately the right direction.
On passage I usually turn off the helm chartplotter, to keep power
consumption down.

My captain loves all the toys....(c; He hands me new boxes and says,
"Can you make this work on our system?"....usually as he's headed out the
hatch to get out of the way. Gotta love him....(c;
Larry

On VALIS, I'm the captain, electronics tech, and owner. I struggle to keep
the captain's love of gadgets from giving the tech way too much to do, and
making the owner upset with the unnecessary expense. It can be a challenge!
It's a good thing they are all such nice guys. Brave and handsome, too!
And no, we're not schizophrenic.

-Paul

"Paul" wrote in
:

On VALIS, I'm the captain, electronics tech, and owner. I struggle to
keep the captain's love of gadgets from giving the tech way too much
to do, and making the owner upset with the unnecessary expense. It
can be a challenge! It's a good thing they are all such nice guys.
Brave and handsome, too! And no, we're not schizophrenic.



My captain knows it only takes a pint or two of his fine English ale and
his electronic technician follows along well. He has money, I don't
much, but I refuse his offers. "Simply take me sailing with you." is my
reward. I'm always welcome. I've spent months aboard in other ports
fixing things that got broken, like our Perkins that got waterlogged
offshore of Florida. I spent a month in Daytona Beach aboard her while
Cutter Doc, the great local diesel mechanic, straightened her out. Cap'n
went back to Atlanta, leaving it in my hands. I can put work on hold in
my business, during some slow months. When he and the Gulfstreamer race
team showed up, she was ready to cast off as soon as the gourmet cooks
moved the local Publix supermarket to Lionheart's larder. In the galley,
they cook...I wash dishes and clean house. That works great. You don't
want to eat MY cooking...(c;

There's a misconception about autopilots I see on your response.
Autopilots don't go to waypoints. They do as they are told, turning this
way and that, when told to by the nav softwares. I'm quite surprised you
have so much trouble making Raymarines own nav software waypoint their
own equipment. Something must not be setup right.

As to the up-to-dateness of the electronic charts, there's a reason we
use The Cap'n. My captain's billionaire boss has a huge motoryacht,
160' I think it is. They use The Cap'n and have a full subscription to
all the charts on the planet, updated ASAP on CDROMs. Guess who gets
last month's pack of old CDROMs....(c; Electronic charts on the laptop,
here, are only a month old....close enough. Last year, my captain rode
the big yacht to the Monaco Boat Show, where this megayacht was on
display to potential buyers. He saw a big difference between it and
Lionheart. They took on 6500 gallons of diesel in Bermuda, having come
around from Ft Lauderdale. There were some storms between Bermuda and
the Azores. The boat stores 10,000 gallons of diesel in its tanks. THEY
HAD TO SLOW DOWN BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH FUEL TO MAKE AZORES
about half way there....(c; Geoffrey said he loves sailboats much
better, now. "Fill 'er, up? Will that be Mastercard, VISA, AMEX, Carte
Blanche or Swiss bank transfer, sir?"....hee hee. 10,000 gallons at
$5.20/gallon would put me to ROWING! Their dingy has twin 250 outboards
on a center console fishing boat.

Larry

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Paul" wrote in
:

There's a misconception about autopilots I see on your response.
Autopilots don't go to waypoints. They do as they are told, turning this
way and that, when told to by the nav softwares. I'm quite surprised you
have so much trouble making Raymarines own nav software waypoint their
own equipment. Something must not be setup right.

I was just using shorthand regarding the autopilot and waypoints -- I am
familiar with how it works. Thanks, though (sincerely). Since I don't use
the chartplotter waypoints except for a visual aid, I haven't been too
bugged by the difficulties. Waypoints entered at the navstation do show up
at the helm, but there are strange interactions when we try to enter and
edit from both stations. I will probably just ignore the problem until I
install the new gear. Or I might decide that it bugs me enough to look into
it more carefully. You never can tell...

Speaking of thread drift, I see you reminescing about KMI elsewhere. I used
to copy KMI and KPH when I was trying to work up to a ham extra license. I
never made it past 18WPM reliably, so I only have the advanced ticket
(wb6cxc). I still drive by the KMI and KPH antenna farm, and there are
still lights blinking on top of the KPH poles (out on Pt. Reyes).

-Paul

"Paul" wrote in
:

Speaking of thread drift, I see you reminescing about KMI elsewhere.
I used to copy KMI and KPH when I was trying to work up to a ham extra
license. I never made it past 18WPM reliably, so I only have the
advanced ticket (wb6cxc). I still drive by the KMI and KPH antenna
farm, and there are still lights blinking on top of the KPH poles (out
on Pt. Reyes).



No more code test, now! Go memorize the stupid questions to the Extra
test and get the "No Code Extra". Wee don need no steenking CW enny mo'!
Ham radio has joined the 20th (not 21st) Century! I moved up from
Advanced I'd had for 20+ years during that little timeslot between when
they dropped the 20wpm code test and when they changed Extra tests to
more questions than it used to be. I always wanted a "real" ham call to
replace the just AWFUL KN4IM FCC issued me with Advanced. Try to get 20
people you know to write down KN4IM, correctly, only repeating it on HF
less than 5 times, without getting the N and M all mixed up. My current
call is for my hometown here in Charleston, SC. W4CSC....a great vanity
call. It even has a nice swing to it on CW..(c;

Go upgrade. Lots easier now.....sorta like getting a GROL instead of a
1st Class FCC ticket used to be.

73 DE W4CSC K

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Paul" wrote in
:

Speaking of thread drift, I see you reminescing about KMI elsewhere.
I used to copy KMI and KPH when I was trying to work up to a ham extra
license. I never made it past 18WPM reliably, so I only have the
advanced ticket (wb6cxc). I still drive by the KMI and KPH antenna
farm, and there are still lights blinking on top of the KPH poles (out
on Pt. Reyes).

No more code test, now! Go memorize the stupid questions to the Extra
test and get the "No Code Extra". Wee don need no steenking CW enny mo'!
Ham radio has joined the 20th (not 21st) Century! I moved up from
Advanced I'd had for 20+ years during that little timeslot between when
they dropped the 20wpm code test and when they changed Extra tests to
more questions than it used to be. I always wanted a "real" ham call to
replace the just AWFUL KN4IM FCC issued me with Advanced. Try to get 20
people you know to write down KN4IM, correctly, only repeating it on HF
less than 5 times, without getting the N and M all mixed up. My current
call is for my hometown here in Charleston, SC. W4CSC....a great vanity
call. It even has a nice swing to it on CW..(c;

Go upgrade. Lots easier now.....sorta like getting a GROL instead of a
1st Class FCC ticket used to be.

73 DE W4CSC K

I am considering the upgrade, but I might want to keep the old call. WB6CXC
isn't a great one (better in CW than on phone), but I've become used to it
over the last 30+ years. Also, it's kind of neat to hold two obsolete
licenses: the Advanced ham, and my 1st Class Phone. OK, the 1st Phone is
expired, but I still have the certificate somewhere (like new, never used).
I sort of like Morse code, but I agree it is an anachronism now. I haven't
made a CW contact in perhaps 15 years, and the only Ham work I do is when I
am at sea, with the Pacific Seafarer's Net, or the occasional ham contact.
During the last trip I just used the marine bands and the satphone.

73, Paul