Fan on Ford Galaxy affected by TomTom??

[Matt69]

This is really odd, I cannot understand it but wondered if anyone else had come across it.

I have had my Tom Tom Go910 for a few years now. We recently bought a Ford Galaxy as a family car. I plugged my Tom Tom in and wanted to set a destination. The Ford's fan was on full blast, I tried to turn it down and couldn't. Turn it off, fan still running!!!!! How odd. Anyway afer much fiddling I find the car's fan runs at full blast whenever the Tom Tom cigarette lighter charger is plugged in and connected to the GPS unit. Disconnect the Tom Tom, fan goes off.

I have plugged a Nintendo DS charger in but it has no effect on the car, only the TOM TOM. This is really odd as it is only a charger, how in the name of jumping jelly fish can it affect the car's fan?

Has anyone else seen this?

Matt

 

[dhn]

I have seen a post or two where the user was absolutely convinced his gps was interfering with either his automatic windows or door locks, forget which. Have never heard of this, though..........

Hopefully, some of our members with a background in car wiring, etc. will jump in here (moderator canderson comes to mind )

I also editing the title of the thread so people won't think they stumbled on a car forum rather than a TomTom gps forum.

 

[mikealder]

DennisN on the UK PGPSW forum had an issue where the TT car charger (or was it the HTC Athena charger) prevented the vehicle from either starting and/ or being shut down, the easy option is to move the feed cable to the ciggy socket to a different fuse or try a different charger cable, its probably electro magnetic interference being fed back in to the car socket that is upsetting the vehicles electronics - Shouldn't, occur but it can and does happen from time to time - MIke

 

[canderson]

Sorry - my experience with that marque ended with the Ford Galaxie a lot of years ago. The Galaxy is a Euro only minivan, the most recent version of which is being made in Belgium.

I can vouch for the fact that some of the older TT models do produce a fair bit of EMI, and the adapters allow EMI from the unit itself to be coupled back into the vehicle DC wiring. It shouldn't have any impact on the fan control, but nothing would much surprise me these days. Based upon some of the EMI I get in my vehicle's radio, I wonder if the 910 was ever tested to CISPR25 (EMI standard for devices in European vehicles). I know a lot of products of the vintage of the 910 and earlier often were not.

It would be of interest to know if you have any other devices that use a USB mini-B cig-vehicle adapter that you could try to see if you can power your 910 to see if the problem goes away. The experiment won't tell us whether the problem was poor filtering at the adapter or the overall noise of the 910, since a different adapter might filter the conducted noise if it's coming from the 910, but it would be good to know.

One possible solution to test: If you can find a friend who knows something about this business, have him provide you with a snap-on ferrite EMI filter, and loop the adapter's power cord through it a couple of times and see if that improves things. They look like this:

http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=240-2133-ND

 

[mikealder]

The 910 was pre-Mini-USB and uses a round power plug fed to the device via its mounting shoe, I would try putting a ferrite ring around the cable going to the ciggy socket, you can get these that simply clip around an existing cable and they work wonders for removing higher frequency noise which is what a car charger addaptor will be spitting back to the cars supply. Or try and use an alternate 910 car charger (if you can find/ borrow one) - Mike

 

[canderson]

Looks like while I was fumbling around for a photo for my edit, you came to the same conclusion about the ferrite. I know a lot of companies were pretty lax about EMI testing beyond the usual EN55022 radiated requirements when they weren't plugging into the mains. Some of the conducted stuff on vehicle powered units has turned out to be pretty ugly.

Ooops on the 910. For some reason, I still picture one model in my head while writing about another. It's getting worse with the advent of the x40 and x50 models!