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hi youtubers jeff cote here with another session of ask pys so we've got a boater named mike and mike asks a good question he's got a 46 grand banks and he's run he has a conundrum big word by the way um i think i almost pronounced it right and he's got a ferono black box dss one uh basically a fish finder the black box sounder is connected to my pc running tz navigator and here's where it gets interesting this black box has two connections to ground one that with power shield and one with a lug on the case what is the best place to ground each of these oh this is a tough one isn't it why multiple negatives well i remember when i started this whole world after graduating university and trying to figure all this stuff out i didn't understand either to be quite honest so there's really two concepts and we're going to do a special probably long video on grounds because it's been requested a numerous times by you guys the youtubers out there so what we want to do so you've got this concept of what's called an rf ground and a return ground right so you're going to have a shield yes connected on the wire so that basically everything is sort of grounded to the battery but it's also important to have the case shielded and that's basically what there's a big distinction between what's called the non-current carrying ground and a current carrying ground right so one is a return path right that's actually you're expecting current on and the other one is really no current at all it's just a reference point so for instance in this case the black box right that little lug on the side that needs a connection that is to keep everything grounded at actually basically zero and it's not we're not expecting any current on that wire but sometimes there's a lot of magnetic interference right like inductive like when current goes through a wire it causes induction regardless right like there's always a magnetic flux as current goes through wires and since there's a lot of wires in boats and there's a lot of wires close to one another one way to alleviate or stop all these sort of weirdness or ghosts on the boat is to have everything properly grounded and the way to do that is to have a non-current carrying grounds connected or the rf grounds connected to all the electronic equipment on your boat so you basically run a small wire to all these points they all end up being connected to a common ground point but you're not expecting current on that cable it's just to keep the equipment or the electronics at the same potential and so you know a lot of people don't do it because it works without it but then if things are weird and acting up you know if you don't follow the instructions we can't really blame the equipment right we've got to blame ourselves right because we didn't follow the instructions so when we do navigation system installs i definitely ask my techs to wire the rf ground to a non-current carrying connection that is going to be separate from the dc negative connection on that boat definitely worth doing thank you for watching this pys video if you've got further questions please ask it below or contact us on our contact form on our website and don't forget to subscribe thanks again for watching English (auto-generated)