S1000 experience
I had a lightning strike on my boat which fried my simrad AC20 course computer. Since I already had the Simrad pump which could handle my steering rams I decided to try the S1000 on my 330 express even though its not advertised for use on boats over 25 feet. I used the computer and remote only and connected it up to my existing simrad pump. In general, it works OK. It holds a course well, and in track mode it stays on course to within about 500 feet. I was more than a little disapointed with the track mode as I wanted to use it to navigate through channels and expected much higher course keeping accuracy. While it works well if your track has long legs and you have lots of searoom to get on each new leg heading, it does NOT work well when your track has lots of short legs and frequent course changes. But bottom line is it works well, it handled my simrad RPU160 pump with no problem, it does most of what I need it to do, and best of all its darn cheap.
In my quest to get it to track better I sent it in to Raymarine twice, once for a firmware update and the second time they replaced the circuit board. Turns out there was nothing "wrong" with it, it just does not track well as noted above. Other than raymarine tech support not knowing how well their product worked so thay could say "yup, 500 feet of course error is normal, don't bother trying to get it any better than that" my overall experience with them was a good one.
Note that I interfaced it to the my Garmin 3010C.
I had a lightning strike on my boat which fried my simrad AC20 course computer. Since I already had the Simrad pump which could handle my steering rams I decided to try the S1000 on my 330 express even though its not advertised for use on boats over 25 feet. I used the computer and remote only and connected it up to my existing simrad pump. In general, it works OK. It holds a course well, and in track mode it stays on course to within about 500 feet. I was more than a little disapointed with the track mode as I wanted to use it to navigate through channels and expected much higher course keeping accuracy. While it works well if your track has long legs and you have lots of searoom to get on each new leg heading, it does NOT work well when your track has lots of short legs and frequent course changes. But bottom line is it works well, it handled my simrad RPU160 pump with no problem, it does most of what I need it to do, and best of all its darn cheap.
In my quest to get it to track better I sent it in to Raymarine twice, once for a firmware update and the second time they replaced the circuit board. Turns out there was nothing "wrong" with it, it just does not track well as noted above. Other than raymarine tech support not knowing how well their product worked so thay could say "yup, 500 feet of course error is normal, don't bother trying to get it any better than that" my overall experience with them was a good one.
Note that I interfaced it to the my Garmin 3010C.