Follow Up To Extinct Autohelm ST-50 Transducers!

It’s just not easy to test a newly installed depth transducer while the boat is 10 feet up in the air on the hard! After our investigation and finding what we hope is the right transducer, we installed it in a two inch hole in Winterlude’s bottom.

(Note:  to read the original post detailing how we finally were able to replace a supposedly extinct autohelm st-50 transducer with a brand new one that’s supposedly compatible with our systems, click here.  Do yourself a favor before you invest in entirely new electronics — unless you just want brand new electronics — we’d love to have them, but there are other priorities first!)

Yesterday we held our breath as the travel lift slowly lowered the boat.  David jumped on board and went down to make sure the installation was done right and we weren’t already sinking before they lowered the boat the rest of the way into the water.

VICTORY!!!  No leaks!  But also no way to tell if the new transducer worked … yet.

We still had to connect the cable from the transducer to the ST-50 depth, speed and trip odometer at the helm.  But that requires either a delicate splice or rerunning the cable and that’s going to be alot of hassle.

David’s idea was to take the new cable, attach it to the transducer, run it through the boat loose and to the helm instruments.  If it’s going to work, it should work now that we’re back in the water (finally!).  So this morning, we put it to the ultimate test.   And look what happened! Now to splice the cable.  If it doesn’t work after we splice the cable, then we know the cable is bad and we’ll have to resplice back to the new cable and go to the hassle of re-running that cable.

But if it DOES work, then we’ll have saved a bunch of extra work.   🙂   Splice day hopefully is tomorrow – we need to borrow a friend’s tool … and maybe a friend … to help with electronics cable splicing.   Keep your fingers crossed!