Chart Plotter is Working

 On Tuesday afternoon I stopped by Marine Electronic Services to see about the two ailing Raymarine C120 chart plotters and Peter Turner the technician and owner was there to greet me as I entered his premises.  My suggestion had been that he use the backup chart plotter that could not see the boat's radar for spare parts to fix my first-line chart plotter.

To my surprise told me that both C120's were now working fine.

There had nothing organically wrong with my first-line C120 that had failed during our passage from Busselton.  A software glitch had placed the unit into an endless loop, probably caused by an instantaneous drop in voltage from the boat's battery bank, even though the engine had been running at the time of failure. All that the chart plotter had needed was a re-initialisation which would have brought it back up to normal functionality at the small cost of losing my waypoints.  Peter showed me how to re-initialise the chart problem to factory default were problem to happen again.  

 The story of the backup C120 that could not see the radar was more interesting.  Peter determined that the C120 was so old that its firmware could not interact with the boat's more modern Raymarine radar.  He simply upgraded the chart plotter's firmware and Voila! the C120 began displaying the sweeps of the radar. I was very impressed with his analysis, and now I had a fully functional backup C120 that I had purchased years earlier though eBay for only $250..

At the yacht club I left the backup C120 in the car and took the first-line unit on board and installed it.  The C120 came up well and could see the radar, but was not displaying charts because the unit's Navionics SD memory card was in the backup C120 that I had left at the car.  I decided install the Navionics card when out at sea during our planned sail on the following day.