So....I jumped back in with the holiday deals on the Livescope stuff. It came Thursday and I ran out to start hooking and wiring everything up. Instead of undoing the wires on my main batteries...I decided to just test it to make sure everything worked. I hooked the GLS10 black box power to a separate 12v 54amp hour battery I had handy. The Garmin unit itself was hooked up to my main boat battery. Well...on the black box, all I got was a blinking red light. It wouldn't recognize the transducer. I called Garmin and they said it sounded like a bad transducer. We started the deal for a return...they were going to send me a new one whenever they received the defective one. I was a little bummed but hey...if there's one bad one out of a million, I'm gonna end up with the one bad one. That's just my luck.
I was going to ship the transducer Monday (today). Over the weekend though, my buddy came over with his boat and I had the idea of trying my transducer on his black box. It worked just fine. Hmm. So I tried his transducer on my black box...and nadda. Red blinking lights.
So I called Garmin this morning and told them I had the return label for the transducer but told them the above story...and that I knew now that the transducer was fine. It must be the black box. Right? Well...this tech guy was a little more knowledgeable. He asked me what power source did I have for the box and unit. As soon as I told him I had the graph unit and black box hooked to two different batteries...he says "there's your problem...the black box and unit have to be hooked to the same battery. Now in my head...12v is 12v. Why would it matter as long as it was 12v. But he seemed adamant that my problem was in the batteries. He told me to try putting them on the same battery and he'd call me back in 30 mins. I reluctantly went out to the boat...did a quick connect job and put the Blackbox and graph on the same battery. And couldn't believe it. Green light on the black box...works just fine.
And wouldn't you know it...wind is blowing 15-20 mph steady and higher gusts. No lake today to even get to play with it. In fact...waiting on the power company to come now as the wind just knocked a tree down on the lines. No power.
