Livescope ground to boat water ground

I have a mercury outboard motor, what should livescope black box be grounded to?

Battery ground of the starting battery unless you have a designated electronics battery then to that battery.

The power cord is connected with - and + to unit and battery. The manual called to connect to water ground. I e-mailed Garmain and they said connect black box ground to engine negative bus or engine block to have it grounded to water.

I don't notice a difference with or without it, so I left it off. :dono

Easier to move from boat to kayak that way, and the kayak is plastic, so there is no "water ground" unless you put the wire end in the water. rotfl

Note for the electrically savvy (you may already know this, forgive me) : there is no continuity between the input power ground and the case of the GLS10. I have tested it. The ground screw only grounds the metal enclosure (box), which may help with shielding if you have something noisy on the boat radiating RFI (radio-frequency interference), or if in an area with strong EMI (electro-magnetic interference) like a power transmission line, maybe. IMO it only needs to be grounded if it helps a noise problem, and should be connected to the same place the negative side of the GLS10 power cable is, usually at the battery. In any noise problem situation, it is always better to fix the source of noise if you can (re-route power cable away from TM power cable, use a separate battery for "clean" power, etc), than to use a ground or ferrite core..

I am in the process of installing the Livescope and had no intentions of grounding the black box unless I encountered display noise and could not mitigate it by other measures. But just out of curiosity I contacted Garmin Support in regards to this ground terminal and received the following:

It would run to a water ground or some piece of thru hull metal that is always in contact with water. This helps to mitigate interference.
Thank you for choosing Garmin,
James
Product Support
Garmin International
For 24-hour access to support videos, manuals, FAQs & more, visit the Marine Support Center.

If you are using the starting battery for power then it gets grounded to water when you connect the neg lead to the neg terminal of the battery. I think they are more concerned with systems that use a separate battery for powering the unit. In that case all you have to do is common up the neg sides of the batteries.

The manual calls this a "water ground" and it works best if connected as per Garmin's reply listed above. Its already connected internally to the ground but will clear up the image if connected to an aluminum hull or some other way to the water. Made mine clearer!

Water ground not needed.


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