I have had poor experiences with Raytheon and Raymarine service.

In addition to the infant mortality issues with the new Raymarine autopilot I posted above:

A long time ago, when I didn't have spare parts, I had a problem in the South Pacific. The A/P got erratic. Since I had to go home on family matters I removed everything but the drive and brought it with me. I overnighted it to Raytheon. They returned it in about two weeks and said they re-soldered a connector but found nothing wrong. Bill: about $250. Re-installed it and the problem was still there. After playing with it for a while I discovered a broken wire in the compass - easily found by tilting it. Called Raytheon from Tahiti - told them what happened - they said that to check that they would be tilting compasses all day. I said yea and you would be fixing autopilots instead of returning them still broken. They refunded my money.

I talked to another cruiser about that same time. They sent a course computer to them with a note inside describing the problem - got it back not fixed and the note was still inside - they never even opened it.

I wore out a set of brushes on a drive motor. They tried to sell me a new motor. Years later I found out why - the motor builder went out of business. They would not tell me that when I talked to them. Went to an automotive shop where the counter guy let me look through a dozen sets of brushes until I found a set that I could sand down to fit. That set is still in there.

This past Wednesday and Thursday were spent on the phone waiting to talk to someone. After 20 minutes they make you leave a voicemail with a promise of a callback within 24 hours - didn't happen. Again on Thursday on hold. They finally picked up. The guy I talked to - in the autopilot department had to put me on hold a couple of times to get the part numbers. One of the numbers he gave me was obsolete. He transferred me to the parts order dept. They had to xfer me back to autopilots where I sat for another 20 minutes and had to leave a message again. Will be calling again tomorrow.

With all the unemployment in this country and considering how busy they are you would think they could hire some seasonal help.

The old Autohelm 6000 (pre seatalk) was a pretty solid product. The mechanical drive is excellent - better than the hydraulic. 125,000 sea miles is a lot to ask of this equipment. Service is very important to me. Scrapping a whole autopilot because they WON'T (not can't) fix a discontinued product is not acceptable to me.