Hey All,
Roughly four years ago I purchased a Dragonfly (Model #E70085). I'm usually not your every weekend fisherman. I go fishing about once a month and sometimes I can't even find the time to go fishing for months in a row. Around the second year into my warranty I noticed the unit went blank and didn't power up afterwards. Since it was the last trip of the year and my bilge and navigation lights had gone unresponsive as well, I figured there was something wrong with my boats' electric circuit and decided to fix the entire fusebox come next spring.
Last year I did so. But although my bilge and lights started working again, the display of my unit still did not respond when trying to power up. I turned the unit around a few times and checked for anything out of the ordinary. That's when I noticed the bottom connection pin was broken and the pins seemed quite corroded altogether. I called my distributor, who said that this sometimes happens when you often unplug the unit (I need to, because stuff often gets stolen), but because the connection pins are in the unit and not the cable, he could not do anything to help me out. I was offered to send in my unit which could be fixed for around €250,00. This, in my opinion, was too expensive because I haven't used the unit regularly. I'm always very careful with my electronics and take every precaution not to damage anything.
I decided to approach one of Raymarine's representatives at a December fishing event in Holland. When I told him about my issues he gave me a facepalm and told me that, unfortunately, there was little he could do to help me out.
This week I installed an old unit on to my boat, so I could at least see what's happening below the surface. That unit didn't work either and I found out I had a busted fuse. That gave me some hope that I had been wrong all along and the unit might still work. Today i tried whether the dragonfly worked with the fuse repaired. When installing it I did so with the utmost care, yet TWO more connection pins came crumbling out, making the total busted pins THREE! I'm truly wondering if there's somebody has a sollution to this issue? I've hardly used the unit compared to many other users out there, and I've had about six different units over the past 15 years. This never happened with any of them and I'm a bit disappointed about it happening the first time I've used Raymarine, which had been a quite satisfactory experience up untill now.
