Nautic Laugic GPS Speedo and Perfect Pass

[stoked 1,039]

Hey all, wanted to share this issue to hopefully save a little time and money for anyone else has this problem. A year and a half ago I swapped my speedo and perfect pass over to use the Nautic Laugic http://nauticlaugic.com/nl4.html It stopped working a week or two ago and I found a bit where the receiver wire looked a little chewed up. So I ordered a new wire and receiver (at the tune of $110), and that solved the problem for the speedo, however, the perfect pass was still reading 0, which is a massive pain when trying to surf. After several back and forth emails with their support, I finally got this out of them:

 

Jake,

The NL4 is not the issue. We have investigated this problem with other Centurion customers… they witness the same issue you are, only they don’t even have an NL4, they are paddlewheel only. It’s the way Faria made the speedometer, and seems to get worse as the speedometer ages.

The symptom includes non-responsive behavior from the Speedometer and/or PerfectPass. And typically disconnecting the paddlewheel signal wire from the Speedometer somehow revives the PerfectPass back to life.

In this configuration, the Speedometer is operating in tandem with a PerfectPass, and potentially the speedo is ‘loading-down’ the paddlewheel signal. The burdened paddlewheel signal pulses to 67% of nominal (zero to near 8Vdc), instead of the full zero to 12Vdc. The PerfectPass doesn’t respond well when denied the full 12Vdc signal… yet it may continue to work. Even so, there’s NO Electrical damage being done to the PerfectPass.

So far this issue is localized to Centurion boats. Also it appears these are isolated cases within the brand, for our Customer Service was alerted to it a mere handful of times.

Further snooping of the Speedo’s internal circuit, we found a way to reconfigure the NL4-CT to isolate/split the GPS output (paddlewheel) signal: and separate the speedo from the PerfectPass. Thus the NL4-CT can feed the Speedo’s maligned circuit and still keep the PP happy. This upgrade eliminates the ‘loading’ issue completely.

We started putting this upgrade in all our NL4-CT’s last year, so if you want to send your unit back, we will definitely upgrade it for free. It’s not required to send the GPS Receiver.

Hope this helps anyone who may be having the same issue!

[bcollins 18]

Interesting, when I hooked up my PP I had issues with the speed reading and thought it was because I has it split to 3 different guages (Pilot, Analog Speedo, and PP). I decided I would rather have the digital so I disconnected the Analog Speedo (Faria Guage) and all was good. I just figured it was because I was trying to split the signal 3 ways, which probably doesn't help and may still be part of the cause, but it kind of confirms what they said if I'm reading it correctly.