Yesterday we braved the elements to help Dave from Aztec Marine with a networking problem on one of our latest Aqua Pro PCs that Aztec had installed on a yacht on the Hamble.
The yacht was fitted with a complete set of Raymarine E series (Classic) and had been running Raytech on an older Windows XP computer. Now with a brand new Aqua Pro PC running Windows 7, we came across a problem where we could not set a static IP address for the PC’s wired network adaptor (LAN). This is required in order to connect Raytech to the E Series network and every time we manually set the static IP address, the PC would revert back to a dynamic IP address when you rebooted.
A quick check on the forums, found that we were not the only customer to have suffered this problem and thank fully Raymarine had a fix for this, although some of the links in the forum articles to the required files did not work. The file you need can be downloaded from this page on the Raymarine website and then scroll down and click on the RayTech Network Config Tool link.
Basically with the additional User Access Controls (UAC) in Windows 7, it was not as simple to change to a static IP address as was the case on Windows XP and Raymarine have developed a small utility to allow the IP address to be changed. Running the utility, resetting the network adaptor and then selecting 10.0.0.3 as the new IP address, seemed to fix the problem and a quick reboot confirmed the setting was now permanent.
With the networking issue sorted, we could now run the RayTech software and share charts, data, radar and all of the other information on the Raymarine E Series network.
One last task was to tweak the mouse settings to get the track ball, that is built-in to the wireless keyboard, to operate smoothly and we were soon on our way back to Aztec’s office to defrost ! Big thanks to Dave for another good Digital Yacht installation and I hope our experience might help other RayTech users who want to update to Windows 7 or 8.
