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Normal autopilot operations
are also a little different with the TR-1. A feature called Shadow Drive
means that once you’ve engaged the pilot with the control, it will
go into standby any time you move the wheel and then take over again when
you hold the wheel steady. It’s easy as pie, and the fact that you
don’t need to regularly reach for a “standby” or “dodge”
button is one of the reasons that Nautamatic doesn’t feel obliged
to provide a fixed control head. Another is that heading can easily be
displayed and controlled on a plotter, though I suspect many salts will
be reluctant to part with a normal pilot’s course dial.
Discussing the TR-1’s
tracking and turning ability brings me into difficult territory. I can
easily mount a chartplotter on my test boat and try it out in ways applicable
to most everyone’s boating, but autopilots are complicated to install,
and their performance is quite dependent on specific boat and operating
conditions. That said, my experience on a TR-1 Gladiator demo boat—a
Whitewater 32 with hard-to-turn twin (noncounter-rotating) Yamaha 225s—was
impressive. The autopilot seemed able to hold course even during rapid
acceleration or deceleration, heedless of every big wake we could find.
Power steering using the controller or the new wireless unit (see product
writeup) was responsive yet well mannered. On most autopilots you simply
set a maximum turn rate—sometimes a couple of settings based on boat
speed—but you set the Gladiator based on the G-force felt by its
included rate gyro. The results: At slow speeds it will turn very sharply,
but not frighteningly so at high speed.
I also made some calls
to professionals who’ve been working with Nautamatic. Chris Cass
of Tech Service Marine Electronics in Longwood, Florida, described how
he stress-tested a Gladiator he’d installed on a 28-foot, triple-outboard
Fountain—trimming the bow way down, flipping the tabs from side to
side, working the throttles in weird ways—and couldn’t get it
to wiggle more than one degree. “I’ve been working with autopilots
for 25 years, and Nautamatic has hit a home run,” he says. Eddie
Winder of Wintron Electronics, a New Jersey distributor, told me how his
dealer clients have successfully installed Nautamatics on everything from
a 25- to a 120-footer (working with that vessel’s own steering pumps)
and how one sale usually generates several more. “You should call
your column ‘Nautamatic Raises the Bar,’” he says. Both
gentlemen emphasize that they continue to sell and very much like other
autopilots.
Therein lies Nautamatic’s
greatest challenge. For the same reasons that I can’t test autopilots
well, boaters are hard-pressed to choose a brand and model. Perhaps more
than any other category, autopilots are, as Raymarine product manager
Steve Crane says, “bought on trust.” And it seems like there
are improved, even new, trusted-brand autopilots appearing every day.
Raymarine just replaced its midsize pilot with a scaled-down version of
the successful SmartPilot—“like going from an old PC to a Pentium
4,” says Crane—at a lower price and with newly available display
and joystick options. According to Furuno product manager Eric Kunz, his
company’s new NavPilot is “the most exciting product we’ve
introduced since NavNet.” NavMan, too, has just entered the autopilot
category, with what looks like a smartly designed 3100 system. And Simrad,
heir to the famously trusted Robertson brand, also has a new pilot series.
All these manufacturers
are using more powerful, better-programmed processors along with included
(or highly recommended) rate gyros to make their autopilots work substantially
better while requiring much less user-tweaking. And, by the way, an autopilot—particularly
one that works well and keeps on working—is one of the handiest tools
a skipper can have. I’ve been on a fast-planing demo boat under the
control of a Raymarine SmartPilot when the operator shoved one engine
in neutral, and it didn’t twitch. I’ve also visited the Simrad
factory in the Norwegian fishing town of Egersund, where a half-century’s
dedication to quality was so evident that my dear, but deeply nontechnical,
wife noticed it. And so I conclude with what’s perhaps becoming a
cliché in this column, but it’s a happy one: If you’re
shopping for an autopilot, you have many good and interesting choices
before you.
Nautamatic Marine
Systems Phone: (800) 588-7655. www.nautamatic.com.
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