Lowrance Elite 7 HDI

[Saltboy]

Hi

I've moved from Kingscliff to Mackay and am going to use my 18 month old Elite 7 as my stand alone GPS with new Elite 7 Ti as my sounder. Trouble is I can't set the HDI up here in Mackay. As being over 1000 kms away from Kingscliff I assumed it would take a few minutes to find satellite. But after 11/2 hours of dicking around trying to reset default settings etc, it will not locate any satellites. I have nothing. Can I do a reboot or something as I want to give boat first run tomorrow and wanted to play around with everything? It has internal antennal. Would appreciate any help

[ranmar850]

Check your basics. I regularly travel that far and my HDI-7 Elite picks up within a few minutes. Have you changed anything else? Aerial lead plugged in properly, assume you have been re-arranging stuff? Clear line of sight to the sky?--internal aerials are a bit weak on them IMO. Turn all your radios off--27Mhz and VHF are usually OK, UHF will play hell with them especially after relocating. DAMHIK.

[scottar]

Are you looking at the satellite status page and seeing absolutely no signal strengths? If so I would try a full system reset (download your marks onto a spare SD card first.) and then try again. Interference can be an issue - personally never seen it from a radio (would probably only happen when transmitting) but definitely from other electronics. If you mount a GPS with an internal antenna in front of another display, it is not uncommon to see a significant drop in signal levels when the unit behind it is turned on. In a worst case scenario I have had to either move a unit or fit an external antenna to make it work.

[ranmar850]

UHF radios are death to a GPS reciever unless mounted a long way off. I went through this for a week last year in a remote area with a newly fitted Elite 7 and UHF. I had the old GPS (Sitec) with external aerial still mounted, and it was also fixing very poorly or not at all. I was tearing my hair out, it would work then not work, and it eventually dawned on me it was the radio. Turn it off, things were normal. I tried mounting the radio as far away as I could, which was only another metre or less, and it improved marginally, but still not good enough. So I had to keep the radio off, which was a PITA as it is the only means of comms in this area, with a repeater nearby.
Checked with a marine tech when I got home,and he confirmed my suspicions. It works OK on large boats, because you can get them far enough from each other--this was what caught me out, as my previous 50 footer didn't give me any issues in that regard.

[scottar]

I suspect ranmar you had other gremlins at play - be it the specifics of the old Sitex, the UHF or a power supply in either unit not filtering properly as an example (even more likely if the radio interfered when simply turned on as no RF of any note should be coming from the radio). It is possible that the individual unit was spuriously emitting a frequency that interfered if some of the filtering internally was not to spec or it was a lesser quality unit. Nearly every 4wd used for off road touring in the country has a UHF and a GPS these days - including a couple I have owned personally without issue and I have never had a drama with any of the trawlers we fitted with UHF (most boats don't get them being a land based radio format) even with the antenna for the UHF being within a few feet of a smart antenna for the GPS.