Or: Why it pays to get someone who really knows what they are doing.
Readers of my forum section know that I didn’t have radar after my mast went up. Even though I had led all the wires out side the mast access plate, intending to clean and overhaul everything and put it together myself, the yard rigger went ahead and plugged everything in and taped it. (Note to self: Leave a note next time.)
I took the radar power connector at the base of the mast apart, verified 12 volts, and gave it a quick scrape to see if a bit of an oxide layer was the problem. Nada. I took the plugs off the wires and checked the screws. Still no radar. Very high resistance across the wires going up to the radome, almost an open circuit.
I accepted Maine Sail’s offer to go up the mast. He showed up, looked first at the deck connector, sprayed the pins with something called DeOxit D5, put a small screw driver in the split brass pin and spread it a bit. He plugged it back together and the radar fired right up when we turned it on. No trip up the mast.
Here’s what I learned. Brass can look quite clean and still have a high resistance oxide layer. My quick scrapes were below the surface of that so didn’t allow contact. Brass also doesn’t hold its spring very well so my quick and dirty “diagnostic” scraping just pushed the split pins further together. The connector felt tight but that was probably only one pin. The Garmin radome doesn’t turn on, and thus shows open circuit across the power wires, until it gets a signal from the chartplotter via the separate network cable.
What’s interesting is to think about how this could have gone. I was sure the deck connector was OK. If Maine Sail hadn’t come, I would have sent the yard guys up the mast to fiddle with the connector on the radar. That couple hundred dollars wouldn’t have fixed things. So, I would have sent them up again to bring the radar antenna down. It then would have gone off to Garmin while I fumed and wrote checks to the yard. Garmin wouldn’t have found any problems. I would have posted some nasty things about Garmin. I’m not sure where the story goes from there but a hot bath, sedatives, and razor blades come to mind.
Another take home lesson is to calm down and be methodical. It’s easy to get frantic when a big problem like this crops up and it’s hard to think sitting in hot sun. Perhaps this is why doctors always have another physician treat family members. Since I had the wires out of the connector anyway, I could have verified 12 volts on the sockets with the connector mated. That would have revealed the problem and saved me the modest but invaluable cost of Maine Sail’s time.
But, hey, if I was perfect, think what we all would have missed learning.
Readers of my forum section know that I didn’t have radar after my mast went up. Even though I had led all the wires out side the mast access plate, intending to clean and overhaul everything and put it together myself, the yard rigger went ahead and plugged everything in and taped it. (Note to self: Leave a note next time.)
I took the radar power connector at the base of the mast apart, verified 12 volts, and gave it a quick scrape to see if a bit of an oxide layer was the problem. Nada. I took the plugs off the wires and checked the screws. Still no radar. Very high resistance across the wires going up to the radome, almost an open circuit.
I accepted Maine Sail’s offer to go up the mast. He showed up, looked first at the deck connector, sprayed the pins with something called DeOxit D5, put a small screw driver in the split brass pin and spread it a bit. He plugged it back together and the radar fired right up when we turned it on. No trip up the mast.
Here’s what I learned. Brass can look quite clean and still have a high resistance oxide layer. My quick scrapes were below the surface of that so didn’t allow contact. Brass also doesn’t hold its spring very well so my quick and dirty “diagnostic” scraping just pushed the split pins further together. The connector felt tight but that was probably only one pin. The Garmin radome doesn’t turn on, and thus shows open circuit across the power wires, until it gets a signal from the chartplotter via the separate network cable.
What’s interesting is to think about how this could have gone. I was sure the deck connector was OK. If Maine Sail hadn’t come, I would have sent the yard guys up the mast to fiddle with the connector on the radar. That couple hundred dollars wouldn’t have fixed things. So, I would have sent them up again to bring the radar antenna down. It then would have gone off to Garmin while I fumed and wrote checks to the yard. Garmin wouldn’t have found any problems. I would have posted some nasty things about Garmin. I’m not sure where the story goes from there but a hot bath, sedatives, and razor blades come to mind.
Another take home lesson is to calm down and be methodical. It’s easy to get frantic when a big problem like this crops up and it’s hard to think sitting in hot sun. Perhaps this is why doctors always have another physician treat family members. Since I had the wires out of the connector anyway, I could have verified 12 volts on the sockets with the connector mated. That would have revealed the problem and saved me the modest but invaluable cost of Maine Sail’s time.
But, hey, if I was perfect, think what we all would have missed learning.
