Quote:
Originally Posted by Halli
Nice Fish.
Are you seeing any heavy voltage draws with your Mega, I ask because mine shuts off a lot like when I fire up the big motor or turn on another finder like my 5XHDI.
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Yes....been through this with HB. First a little bit about my background.......nearly 40 years in the missile field......more electronics schooling than I knew what to do with. I know my electronics. According to HB my wiring was no good. Well my wiring is 10 gauge off the battery straight to the unit with an in-line fuse. There are many forum discussions about this. Many are trying to tell people their problem is wiring that is too small.....and some folks may have wiring too small but it would have to really be a bad wiring job. Humminbirds own power pigtail is only 18 gauge wire. Just hooking the 6 foot pigtail to my unit and to a battery with nothing else in between I get 6/10th of a voltage drop. With my unit hooked to boat with the 10 gauge wire straight from battery I get almost 1.5 volts dropped and that is with about a 15 feet cable run. Humminbird is using a blocking diode to protect the unit if the cable is hooked up with the polarity reversed....which is fine but there are far better ways to do it than using a blocking diode. Using a blocking diode you will get almost 8/10 of voltage drop. But it is what it is and we can’t fix that. My unit was kicking off too as I would crank big motor. I knew my wiring was good.....took my cranking battery to be tested and it load tested good. This was driving me nuts. So took my cranking battery to another place and it tested bad......took it to another place and it tested bad also. Long story short I bought a new cranking battery and problem solved. The research I did on this I found while many were saying the cause was from using wire too small...but in the end 90 percent of the cases I read about a new battery fixed the problem. My cranking battery is only a group 24 size......the next time it goes bad I will replace it with a group 27. These newer units pull a lot of current. My suggestion is to check your wiring....each splice...connection point will drop voltage some. If you can use soldered connections instead of crimping and 10 gauge wire is really overkill but it really only costs pennies more to use it instead of say 16 gauge. But if you are convinced your wiring is good I would bet money your battery is going bad. If you run 20 feet of 10 gauge wire the theoretical voltage drop will only be .12 volts...of course you will have at least one connection where you tie it to the HB pig tail. If you have no other connections your voltage drop should theoretically be only right at .4 volts after wiring on pigtail. But that is not the case. If you go out to your unit and turn down your brightness you will see your voltage come up. It could have been designed better but with good wiring and good battery all will work......although your never going to see the 12 volt reading on the units screen. Mine stays at around 11 volts on the water all day.....sometimes maybe reading 10.9 volts at end of day. I have talked to several folks who have these units and they have similar voltage readings on their unit.....around 11-11.3 volts. Let me know if you find your battery is going bad.
Regards
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