Simrad Autopilots

[Rain Again]

Hi, I have a Shearwater 39 (11 tons, 39 foot, long keel) which I fitted a Navman G pilot to together with a full set of Navman instruments, had nothing but grief with it ranging from the Autopilot swinging the wheel side to side even when it is tied up to the dock all the way through to displays fogging up all the time. Now all the kit is coming off and I need to work out what to fit and what will cause me less grief. The drive is a 12 V constellation drive motor fitted below decks and running on a chain (so it drives the wheel). Steering is cable. The boat has a transom hung rudder so the quadrant is fitted to the rudder on the sea-side of the transom so the rudder feedback unit will be exposed at the back of the boat (so it has to be water proof!). Simrad seem to have a reasonable reputation here (in the UK). Anybody got any feedback on the Simrad AP25? Thanks, Mark

[gc1111]

I have a Simrad autopilot on an Allied Mistress (sounds similar, 39 ft. 22000 lbs, long keel). I have had a LOT of grief from the hydraulic drive unit and Simrad did not stand behind it.
I was unhappy with the electronics until I fixed a couple of things in the installation. One, I fed it with a differentially corrected GPS, and two I moved the fluxgate compass up to near the base of the mast. Turns out that being 4 ft. away from a permanent magnet fresh water pump was not enough. It took me several years to figure out why the boat would suddenly change course by 30 degrees - turned out it was when the pump turned on!

It is a solid well designed unit, but they do not stand behind their systems.

[camaraderie]

Very happy with my AP22 and hydraulic drive....way better than my RayNav ST6000 was.

[RichardElliott]

agree with the poor service comments. I live only 150 miles from their North American service cener but have had a very poor experience with their customer service.

[Rain Again]

Thanks for the feed-back, interestingly Navman's response was top-notch once I worked out who to talk to, trouble was that the endless stream of replacement parts and complete units just couldn't sort out what are very basic design faults. Also had dreadful problems with individual component fails (like how power transistors) which kept on happening because they used bad parts in a whole production run and could not trace what had good and what had bad parts in it. So mixed news about Simrad, and I get bad feedback about much Raymarine kit. Any feedback on Furuno?