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Subject: TWL: RE: GPS down below
From: Kevin Redden (kfredden@XXX.XXX)
Date: Wed Jan 01 2003 - 11:50:16 EST
> -----Original Message-----
> <<The Deluo GPS seems to be extremely sensitive and gets a
> strong signal, even inside my office, compared to the hand held GPS chart
> plotter recently used on our delivery trip, where we had to spend the
> entire freezing night out on the fly bridge because the unit couldn't get
> a signal at the lower helm.>>
On one delivery that I did to Florida, we lost the main GPS due to water intrusion into
the antenna (a Grand Banks 49 with the wind forward of the beam is one WET boat!). When
we tried to use the three different hand held GPS units we had on board, none of them
would pick up a signal from the lower helm. We just went back to DR navigation for the
rest of the night (with radar bearings to help), until we could sort things out in
daylight.
In the morning, we found that all the hand helds worked just fine on deck, it was in the
pilot house that they would drop out. It turned out that the owner had a sun screen film
installed on all the deck house windows. This film had a metallic component that
effectively filtered out the GPS RF signals. Once we knew that, I just duct taped an
external antenna for one of the hand helds to the outside of the main helm window and
ran the wire back in to the GPS unit. Yes, good old duct tape showed it has a new use -
it is transparent to GPS signals!
Cheers,
Kevin
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