Lowrance GPS not displaying time - software patch

[F406]

Not sure if it affects anyone here but thought I’d pop a post up for anyone looking in future.

My Lowrance HDS Gen2 stopped displaying the time last year sometime.

Not a huge drama but a bit annoying and also meant if you went to the tide tables you had to scroll through from about 1912 to today’s date to see the right one because it wouldn’t automatically jump to it.

Apparently it was a bit of a millennium bug style problem in the way the date was coded into the GPS signal - once it clicked past April or so last year the unit just wrapped and decided it wouldn’t display the time or date any more.

The long lockdown days gave me a chance to look into it and there is a fix! Lowrance have put an updated firmware version on their website under the ‘Help and Support’ section that you download onto an SD card. Put it into the unit and turn it on and it will update itself!

Once it’s all done the time and date have magically returned

[Tim M]

Glad you got it sorted. This was a widely advertised issue at the time with all manufacturers; something to do with the clocks on satellites being reset or something!

[Phil and Jane]

It was GPS rollover in April 2019 that caused this. It’s the reason a lot of people upgraded older Chartplotters that weren’t capable of taking firmware updates. It’s a quirk of GPS rectified with newer GPS units.