Just wondering what people’s experiences have been with the reliability of the Outland power supply before we commit to buying? Any thoughts or info would be appreciated!
I would also love to hear the experiences of others here, as we didn’t have a good experience with the two units we acquired.
We experienced a lot of data communication intermittency issues, often resulting in a complete loss of link, in both cases with 250m tethers.
Surprised to hear of any issues - we’ve had a good few units through now and no real problems at all on power supply units, we’ve also put them via the Outland slip ringed tether reel with no issues other than needing modify the connectors at top side, but then that’s also let us use Outland tethers when we’ve been short of cable for jobs - when it gets to the long tethers we do find the data can be more of an issue to be consistent but that’s regardless of whether its a battery or powered unit and is usually a poor connection somewhere in the chain or a laptop being a bit flaky.
Many thanks for the replies. We might need to do some more research.
Data can be an issue anytime you’re running data down the tether with power. While we make our own Surface Power Supplies at Poseidon, we have referred customers to the Outland Tech power supplies before and have not heard any complaints.
Our Lanai ROV uses 240VAC power and the stock FathomX (LX200V20 modules) and we get between 45 and 55Mbps on a 250m tether. We get similar bandwidth on 300m. Interestingly, with one board we did for a test, we were able to get 55Mbps AND 240VAC down the same 125m tether without any issues (with a few tweaks).
Our Lanai Pro systems use either an LX200V20 (on a custom board subsea, FathomX topside) or an LX200V30 module (custom board both ends) depending on the revision. We get only about 55-60Mbps with that on our standard 250m tether, but we can consistently get 30Mbps at 500m of tether, which is why we use it.
Normal noise on the power wires is fine with either module, but it’s possible to have bad “ringing” on the power supply without very careful filter design and this will reduce or eliminate the bandwidth on long tethers.