My day for the catastrophic below deck autopilot failure is probably not long off. It seems there's some kind of compass failure that occurs occasionally and the boat suddenly decides to make a hard turn. Then I'm expected to be at the mercy of Miles who will sell me another discontinued, obsolete, proprietary interface, compass for $600, or he'll recommend I find a "Qualified Local Service Professional". Wahahahahahaha...... 'qualified professional', 'that's a good one centurian'.

For now though the ram and motor seem good. I was advised by the folks that sold it to me that getting the Simrad ram would be a better choice than the B&G ram so that's what I did. But I'm also not pushing it hard either given the small size of the boat and the light helm.

But there's no way I'm doubling down on the B&G money pit. My plan once it's failed beyond usefulness is to use it to create a full sized version of my own Arduino based autopilot. In the mean time I'll use a tiller pilot and dream of how I could have spent that $4000 on a wind vane because to be honest the prospect of how much energy it requires to run auto 24/7 out at sea makes it useless in my book.