Document No.

: HMT/QW-824-68
Version No.: B Edit State: 0
Date: May 18, 2009

OPERATION MANUAL

Voyage Data Recorder (VDR)

Qingdao Headway Marine Technology Co., Ltd.

Tel: (+86)-532-88702807/88702808 Fax: (+86)-532-83107816
24 Hours Service Phone: (+86)13954217693 E-mail: tech@headwaytech.com
Add: F4, 5#Building Area A Huite Industrial City, 177#, Zhuzhou Road, Qingdao, China
 Headway VDR Operation Manual

Content
1 Introduction of Playback Software ...................................................................................................................- 2 -
1.1 Required hardware & Software environment ....................................................................................................- 2 -
1.2 Installation of software ......................................................................................................................................- 2 -
1.3 Introduction of playback software.....................................................................................................................- 5 -
1.3.1 The head page.................................................................................................................................................- 5 -
1.3.2 Sub menu ........................................................................................................................................................- 6 -
1.3.3 Menu shipInfo ................................................................................................................................................- 7 -
1.3.4 Help menu ......................................................................................................................................................- 7 -
1.4 Tools introduction..............................................................................................................................................- 7 -
1.5 Instruction for playback content ........................................................................................................................- 7 -
1.5.1 Conning instruction ........................................................................................................................................- 7 -
1.5.2 AIS instruction................................................................................................................................................- 9 -
1.5.3 Alarm/Status .................................................................................................................................................- 12 -
1.5.4 Play Audio ....................................................................................................................................................- 13 -
1.5. 5 Radar ...........................................................................................................................................................- 14 -
1.5.6 System Event ................................................................................................................................................- 14 -
1.5.7 Ship Info .......................................................................................................................................................- 15 -
1.5.8 NMEA Source ..............................................................................................................................................- 15 -
2 Operation of the Software................................................................................................................................- 16 -
2.1 Download data from the PDC .........................................................................................................................- 16 -
2.2 Download data from Backup Disk ..................................................................................................................- 18 -
2.3 Replay the data ................................................................................................................................................- 19 -
2.3.1 RealTime player ...........................................................................................................................................- 19 -
2.3.2 Replay the data after downloading ...............................................................................................................- 20 -
3 Equipment Maintenance and Failure Removal .............................................................................................- 22 -
3.1 SHIPDC&VDRDC...................................................................................................................................- 22 -
3.2 CH1 AIS ERROR ............................................................................................................................................- 22 -
3.3 CH3 GPS ERROR&ZDA SENTENCE LOSE.........................................................................................- 22 -
3.4 CH5 GYRO COMPASS ERROR....................................................................................................................- 26 -
3.5 CH6 SPEED LOG ERROR.............................................................................................................................- 26 -
3.6 MAIN RADAR ERROR&AIDED RADAR ERROR .............................................................................- 26 -
3.7 PDC CONNECT ERROR ...............................................................................................................................- 26 -
3.8 NOT RECEIVED INF.....................................................................................................................................- 26 -
3.9 Backup Disk Full.............................................................................................................................................- 27 -

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 Headway VDR Operation Manual

1 Introduction of Playback Software

1.1 Required hardware & Software environment
600MHz or above CPU.
128MB or above memory.
20GB or above Hard Disk.
Operating system: Win 9X/Win NT/2000/XP/Vista.
Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or above.
100Mb Network card.
1024*768 Resolution Rate or above.

1.2 Installation of software

Please put the installation disk in the drive and click to open it, find playback software and double click it to
install, and youll find three different shortcuts of VDR software on the desktop of your computer.
As following:

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Please input username and company name, and the S/N is 053283107818.

Continue to click next till the installation is finished. Finally close the installation page.

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And youll find three different shortcuts of VDR software on the desktop of your computer

1.3 Introduction of playback software

Therere four menu items in the main menu, theyre Play, Screen, ShipInfo, Help.
1.3.1 The head page
Double click the VDRPlayer, you will see the following:

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Therere Replay from file , Download From PDC, Extract Audio, Exit, four functions in the Play
menu.
1. Playback from file, is to select the file for playback. After the selection a dialogue box appears. Select the
program path of playback and open config.dat.
2. Download From PDC is to download the data directly from PDC.
3. Function Extract Audio is to save the .wav file of audio and .bmp file of image gained from playback
process in order to check the middle data. If Extract Audio is selected, save .wav file and .bmp file,
otherwise not. Therere two methods.
I: A recommended easy method. After you have selected Extract Audio, the system will save the decoding of the
data playbacked from the file next to the one under play to the one till you cancel Extract Audio. That is, .wav
file of audio and .bmp file of image will be saved to file C:\HeadWay that automatically established. User
neednt to have any other operation.
II: After you have selected Extract Audio, a dialogue box appears. This way is used only when putting the data
under C:\data in advance, meanwhile establishing a file tempdata, which consists of three empty files other,
audio, picture. Then the .wav file of audio and .bmp file of image that decoded in playback process are
separately put in these files.
Usually we dont use this function.
4. Exit is exit the playback system.
1.3.2 Sub menu
Submenu can be directly selected and be put on the current page.
For example, sound is selected, then put sound on current page. If you want to put other page on current page

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to show the content, the same method will be selected.

1.3.3 Menu shipInfo
Function of Reload, Upload, Save.
Function of Reload is to reload the content of ShipInfo
Function of Upload is to upload ShipInfo
Function of Save is to save content of ShipInfo.
This part will be detailed when adding shipinfo.
1.3.4 Help menu
The menu contains help content of the playback software.

1.4 Tools introduction

The toolbar mainly has play, stop, pause, open file and slide bar five tools as follows:

Open file is to open one file, will appear a dialogue box as follows, open config.dat under data folder which
are downloaded from PDC.

Stop is to stop the file under play. Pause is to pause the file under play. If continue to play, click play to play
the file from the break point.
After the file to open selected, play becomes operable, stop and pause turn gray, which indicates
dis-operable.
Play turns gray when playing, stop and pause are both operable.
Slip rail can be dragged to change the content under play.
When the system is busy, thats to pre-deal with the file to play, the tool bar is gray.

1.5 Instruction for playback content

1.5.1 Conning instruction
This page is mainly the basic information of ship shipping and navigation. The data mainly comes from GPS
Speed Log, Gyro compass, When put Mouse cursor on displayed data, it will appear VDR Channel, Equipment,
NMEA info consistent with displayed data. Pls refer to the following Channel, Equipment, NMEA info.

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Time & Position(GPS)

It mainly shows UTC, Local time and Longitude, Latitude, Satellites and Quality. The default data is N/A.

Speed(KN)
When speed data collected is consisted by landscape orientation and portrait speed corresponding to water and to
earth separately, it shows the format as 3-2. If only a relatively speed is gained, turn Transverse to Relative
and show the value of relatively speed measured under Water on third line.

Heading
It shows the heading of ship navigation in 2 different ways. Way I: Heading is always right above the figure(black
dot). Display way I: according to acquired heading angle, turn Gyro Pointer to enable it to point to vessels
headway. Display way II: always enable the direction N to point to the right above, according to acquired
vessels heading data, the pointers direction indicates the vessels heading. Through Gyro & North Up, change
display ways is possible. Way I and Way II is as following:

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Heading value display

It displays the value of True Heading and Magnetic Heading. Blank is N/A.

Power Supply
This to display the Power-Supply working status. When a certain power supply indicator color is red, means
that this power is supplying for VDR. (when AC Power is working, it will be green color, otherwise, it is
grey color)
If DC indicator color is red, shows that DC power from the vessel is working;
If BT indicator color is red, shows that VDR spare Power Supply is working.

1.5.2 AIS instruction

The whole interface is as follows:

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Show Info & Hide Info

Show Info & Hide Info are 2 groups of tools, they respectively show the info & hide the info,
They respectively have 2 tools Guard Zone & Selected All with the function of controlling operative
scope. Guard Zone means the operation towards the vessels within the selected scope (within the circle),
mainly indicates Shows AIS Info & Hide AIS Info. Selected All means show & hide all vessels info
recorded in AIS. Operation towards Show Info & Hide Info can be through clicking the mouse.

Zoom & Guard Zone

The first slip rail means changing the value of Zoom, the second slip rail is changing the size of Guard Zone(circle).
Value of Zoom is from 01NM to 99NM, means that it can display the vessel at 99NM distance from this current
vessel. Guard Zone means the selected scope, change scope is also from 01NM to 99NM. Through these 2 buttons
operation, may select the vessels in different scope.

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Back Color
The Backlight slip rail is for changing the brightness & darkness of background color. Youre free to adjust the
color of blue background according to your own comfortable degree.

Position Move
The four removable buttons including Up, Down, Left & Right enable displayed Guard Zone center to
move in parallel towards above four directions. Default status is that make this current vessel be the center of
Guard Zone, i.e. position of middle little circle. After moving, all the displayed vessels moved to the same
distance in parallel, by this way, we could check vessels info in bigger scope. If click center, all the vessels will
move to original position in parallel, and enable this current vessel to be the center of Guard Zone. All the vessels
move in parallel to the position where center is of this current vessel.

AIS Information Display

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Inside Display Information.

Select some vessels then right-click the mouse, it will show the AIS info as the following figure. These info include
MMSI No., Position, Navigational Status, Heading, Speed, Course over ground, Rate of turn, Distance. Distance
means space between selected vessel and this current vessel. As follwing:

Refer to Info tools in 1.4.2. I, for example, in case:

Show the vessel info of Guard Zone, just select Guard Zone of Show Info;
Show all the vessels info, just select Selected All of Show Info;
Select Guard Zone of Hide Info, hide the vessel info of Guard Zone;
Select Selected All of Hide Info, hide all the vessels info.
At the bottom of this page there is one line characters AIS Pointing At :. This is the geographic position of
marks location. Distance is the space from this current vessel.

In all displayed vessels, sign means this vessel has Heading value, sign means this vessel has not
Heading value.
1.5.3 Alarm/Status
This page mainly is playback of various alarm info, including Acknowledged, Time, Source, Description,
Condition. If alarm info is confirmed, Acknowledged will show ACK; if not, will only show -.
Alarm info will be in turn shown in below form, if alarm info does not send out alarm signals, it will show black
words; if Condition shows alarm red words, it has sent out alarm.

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1.5.4 Play Audio

In one set of VDR system, four microphone channels & two VHF are installed, they are respectively Bridge
Microphone channel 1, Bridge Microphone channel 2, Bridge Microphone channel 3, Outdoor Microphone channel,
& VHF1, VHF2.
1. Equalizer is used to adjust audio effect, may move the slip rail to change.
2. The slip rail of each audio track is used to adjust audio volume, when the slip rails moves to furthest left,
means close this audio track.
3. When audio track has not sound or close, screen will show VDR Sound Meter.

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1.5. 5 Radar
This is to gather the radar data and it will show the Radar image when replaying.

1.5.6 System Event

This is to record all the working circumstances of system and all connected equipments. When carry out
Playback, we can observe the equipment ID, status, date, time. Through reply, the running status of each equipment
before accidents can be understood. It will show the system log information during the current time period.
Attnrefer to Appendix for explanations of equipment ID.

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1.5.7 Ship Info

In Ship Info page, we may check vessels basic info, as well as add and change vessels info. When install system,
may use this function to record vessels info into VDR, when carry on playback, it cannot randomly change
vessels info.
Positioning vessel info method:
Select Play---Play from file ---open, select the file config.dat under data folder, at this
time, positioning is ok.
Directly select open file---open, position file config.dat.
If you could not find the Ship Info when the VDRRealTimePlayer is running, please click
When playback data, ship info will be shown in following page:

1.5.8 NMEA Source

The following page mainly shows the received NMEA sentences which are for users reference and comparison.
NMEA shows for NMEA sentence, Source shows sourcing equipment, Channel shows sourcing channel.

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2 Operation of the Software

Please set the computer IP address as 192.168.0.32 firstly. And then connect the MCU and the computer with
Ethernet Cable. Please refer to the installation manual to finish it.

2.1 Download data from the PDC

The content of the data folder is the same as the content of the PDC. You could copy it from
the Backup Disk
Please switch off the firewall and the power in the Main Cabinet Unit before downloading. Please double click the
VDRPlayer shortcut, choose PlayDownload From PDC

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 Headway VDR Operation Manual

Please input:
Add: 192.168.0.33
User: HMT
Password: HMTPDC
Port: 21
Then click Connect

The left window is the local disk, and we can set the address to save the data in it. Find data in the Server and
right click on the key to select Download. And the data will be saved in the computer.

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2.2 Download data from Backup Disk

Please switch off the power and take out the Backup Disk.

Then connect the Backup Disk to the computer with the CF card reader.
Please switch off the power, take out the CF card and insert into the CF card reader. As following:

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Connect it to the computer and open the CF card.

You could find the data folder and Program Backup folder. And the content of the data folder is the same as
the content of the PDC. The other folders are the backups, which folder name is consist of figures.

2.3 Replay the data

There are two methods to replay the data. One is Realtime player, the other is replay the data after downloading.
2.3.1 RealTime player
Please double click the shortcut VDRRealTimePlayer on the desktop. Please note the firewall is switched off
before operation. And the replaying will be started automatically after 20 seconds. If it is not start automatically,
please click start.

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2.3.2 Replay the data after downloading

Please double click the shortcut VDRPlayer, then click open file or PlayReplay from file

Please choose the Config.dat and open it. The play is changed from disable to enable.

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Click it and the replaying starts.

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3 Equipment Maintenance and Failure Removal

We shall detect the cause of the equipment failure through observing the message show on the screen of Remote
Alarm Panel. Now let me introduce how to check failures when the Remote Alarm Unit indicates relevant alarm
information. First is to check the probable cause of the failure through the Remote Alarm Panel. When the system
works normally, system ok appears on the screen. If it is necessary we can build backups by pressing both ACK
Flash and Test for emergency save.

3.1 SHIPDC&VDRDC
When SHIPDC appears here, it indicates that the 110/220V power has been cut off, and the VDR system is
powered by the emergency power of the vessel. We can press ACK FLASH to stop flashing, press Mute to stop
buzzing and search for the causes. First, check if the power supply is still charged with electricity, and the
connection is good or not. If the connection is good, after plugging in the main power supply, the Remote Alarm
Panel will indicate AC power supply. In case of emergency, in order to save PDC data, it is necessary to press both
ACK FLASH and TEST buttons at the same time until backup 01 appears on the screen, and the data of latest
12 hours will be saved in the big Backup Disk forever. After successful backup, BACKUP 01 will appear on the
screen. SYSTEM OK indicates that the system is working normally.

3.2 CH1 AIS ERROR

When CH1 AIS ERROR appears, the first step is to press the Mute & ACK FLASH to confirm alarm
message. Then check whether AIS equipment is on, whether the plug of AIS input is loose and whether the
connection is good. If the connection is good, we should check whether the AIS equipment can send signals to
VDR. After the failure is eliminated, the displayed information of Remote Alarm Panel screen will disappear
automatically.

3.3 CH3 GPS ERROR&ZDA SENTENCE LOSE

When CH3 GPS ERROR appears, as there is no GPS input, ZDA sentence alarm also appears at the same time.
The first step is to press Mute & ACK FLASH to stop alarm sound, then check whether GPS equipment is on,
whether the plug of GPS input is loose and whether the connection is good. If the connection is good, we should
check whether GPS equipment can send signals to VDR. If only ZDA sentence alarm appears, please check
whether GPS has sent out ZDA sentence. After the failure is eliminated, the displayed information from Remote
Alarm Panel screen will disappear automatically.

Sometimes there is no ZDA sentence for some old style GPS. Please cancel this failure according to the
following instruction.
Please switch off the power and take out the CF card in the Main Cabinet Unit. I mean the PROGRAM DISK.
Insert the CF card in to the CF card reader. As following:

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Open My Computer and find the CF card. Double click it and you will find the data folder, Open the data
folder and you will see the following page. Please double click the icon.

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You will see the following page

Please choose Uart Configuration

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Please press Alt +U, the page will be changed:

Please cancel the choice. I mean to make to disappeared. As following:

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And then please click the . The Save OK will be shown on the left of it. Like this

Then please insert the CF card into the Main Cabinet Unit and switch on it.

3.4 CH5 GYRO COMPASS ERROR

When CH5 GYRO COMPASS ERROR appears, the first step is to press the Mute & ACK FLASH to
confirm alarm message. Then check whether GYPO equipment and GYRO interface are on, whether the plug of
GYPO is loose and whether the connection is good. If the connection is good, we should check whether GYPO can
send signals to VDR. If there is an interface converter, please check whether the converter works well. After the
failure is eliminated, the displayed information of Remote Alarm Panel screen will disappear automatically.

3.5 CH6 SPEED LOG ERROR

When CH6 SPEED LOG ERROR appears, the first step is to press the Mute & ACK FLASH to confirm
alarm message. Then check whether LOG equipment is on, whether the plug of the LOG input is loose and whether
the connection is good. If the connection is good, we should check whether LOG equipment can send signals to
VDR. If there is an interface converter, please check whether the converter works well. After the failure is
eliminated, the displayed information of Remote Alarm Panel screen will disappear automatically.

3.6 MAIN RADAR ERROR&AIDED RADAR ERROR

When the main radar alarm appears, please press the Mute & ACK Flash to confirm the alarm message. Then
please check whether the main radar is on and whether the connection line is loose. When the aided radar alarm
appears, please check whether it is on and whether the connection line is loose. It is beneath the main radar
connection line.

3.7 PDC CONNECT ERROR

When PDC CONNECT ERROR appears, the first step is to press the Mute & ACK FLASH to stop alarm
sound, then please check whether the plug of PDC connection is loose and here I mean 8 core plug. If the
connection is loose, please fasten it. Check whether the plug of the PDC terminal is loose. PDC is on the roof of the
bridge. If the connection cable is not loose, please connect the cable to the computer and check whether the PDC
can get connected. Both of the cable interface are RJ45. Start the computer, click start , and then click run,
enter ping 192.168.0.33 t and see whether can get connected. If not, please check whether there is any voltage
between the foot 6 and foot 7 of the plug in the PDC terminal. (Note: If the PDC plug is 6 core, please check the
foot 5 and foot 6) If there is, please check whether the voltage is 24V. If there is no voltage, please whether there is
any voltage between the foot 11 and foot 12 of A9 terminal in Main Cabinet Unit. If there is, please check whether
the voltage is 24v. If there is no voltage, please confirm whether the Power Supply Unit works normally. If the
terminal of this side has electricity, please check the PDC connection line. If you cant remove the failure, please
switch off the power and check the state of the N1, N2, N3, N4, N5 lamp in the Main Cabinet Unit, then please
contact us. You could find the N1-N5 lamps position by Chapter 7 from the installation Manual.

3.8 NOT RECEIVED INF

When NOT RECEIVED INF appears. The first step is to press the Mute & ACK FLASH to stop alarm
sound, then it is to check whether the connection line of Remote Alarm Panel is loose. Check whether the

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connection lines within Main Cabinet Unit are loose, such as the Backup Disk connection & CF card connection
lines. Check whether the CF card is tightly inserted.

If all these connections are good, the system cant work properly, please take out the Program Disk from Main
Cabinet Unit, through the card reader, insert it into the laptop, and check whether the system files are correct in the
laptop. Please check whether the filename VXWORKS is correct? Then check whether BOOTROM.SYS
filename is correct. Is there a data folder? Under data folder, are there audio, other, picture folders and
radar.cfg, uart.cfg, audio.cfg and vdrconfig.exe. Check the state of the running lamp in the Main Cabinet
Unit and contact us. The lamp should flash once every 15 seconds. You can find it by referring the Installation
Manual.
Note: SYS, cfg, exe are the extended filename.

3.9 Backup Disk Full

Please note that it could store 3 backups in the Backup Disk. When you press the fourth backup, the BACKUP
DISK FULL will be shown. The system could delete the first backup automatically after five hours.

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