Fish Hawk goes nuts when VHF key is depressed

[Erbyjoe]

There was a couple of posts reguarding Interference with there fish hawk when the transmit key was pushed on there VHF radio.Can any one tell me how they fixed the problem My friend is haveing this problem but I am unable to go back and look it up.Does any one remember the cure.Thanks for any help.

Erin

[HitorMissIV]

erbyjoe, Ask your buddy if he has the positive+ lead comming from the same lead / fuse? also antenne cable, make sure it's not running to close to the Fish Hawk. I had simmilar problem with my Lowance sonar unit. Hope this helps .

[Big Dave]

To get the twentyfive watts to transmit it takes a lot of juice. If you are coming off the ignition switch or the regular fuse panel the wiring from the batt. may not be big enough to carry the load. That causes a voltage drop and all that fancy computer stuff on the dash starts shutting down if it gets below 11 volts. Let off the button on the mike the voltage goes back up and the fishfinder , fishhawk, gps , etc all start working ok again. Run a seperate wire, fused, to the radio from the batt. and it should fix your problem.

[jimski2]

The feed wire from the battery to the radio should be 10 Gauge copper to get full transmit power. A guy changed mine to 16 gauge and my buddies said my radio was coming in weak. After I found out and fixed it back to 10 gauge did it work right.

[L&M]

Erin:

All the above posts are right on. Don't run your vhf off the terminal strip that is in the boat from the factory. Run at least a 12 gauge copper lead from the battery to a designated block at the helm (fused 10 amp. at the battery, plus the inline fuse for the unit at the unit). Then run your vhf from there, same with your Fish Hawk. It'll save a lot of problems. As well. Keep your coax lead from the Hawk as far away as you can from your coax lead from the vhf antenna. Should take care of it unless the batteries are running low after trolling. But that Suzuki should have a higher amp charging system even sufficient at low trolling rpm's. What are you using for battery's deep cycle/ start or cranking battery's only?

On another note how did you make out with the control unit?

Hank

[Guest capt ace]

I had a similar problem between my radio and my fishfinder. When I keyed the mic my fishfinder would restart. It drove me nuts for a couple of years before I found out about ferrite magnets. I put them on all chords going to all my electrical units. It kind of worked but not all the time. Then after someone told me NOT TO DO IT I put one on the cable coming out of my Vhf antenna close to the antenna base and VOILA! NO MORE PROBLEMS. I even was able to remove all the other ferrites I had installed all over the place.

You can get the ferrite magnets from http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/c ... rites.html

For the cost of a ferrite magnet it is definitely worth the shot.

[Yankee Troller]

Hey Capt. Ace - how about making that picture a little bit smaller? Better yet get rid of it. This is Steve's website, and he is a charter captain. Your pretty much trying to use his site for free advertising and I dont think that is appropriate. Im not trying to be a punk here, but I do feel it is disrespectful.

[KING ME]

Thanks yankee- capt ace was removed.

[Erbyjoe]

Yankee good job That never crossed my mine but YOUR RIGHT ON THE $$ I will pay more attention next time.

[Big Dave]

I wouldn't be to keen on magnets near the dash of the boat where the compass is. If you use those you would want them as far away from the compass as possable . I love my eletronics, but I want to CMA with the old school stuff to be sure to get home

[waterlogged]

Dave,

I believe they are actually ferrite cores and not actual magnets. Some of your electronic equipment laptop power supplies, etc. have those built right in the cords.

Clarke