The other day, I heard a thunk on the cabin roof as we were cruising along in our CHB trawler. Anne had dropped her wireless autopilot remote control for our Raymarine ST6002 system. She then informed me that it had stopped working and displayed NO PILOT on the screen.
I took it apart and didn’t see any obvious signs of damage. But while I was messing with the circuit board, twisting it a bit, the unit came back to life. It then worked for the rest of the day’s travels. However, the next time we went to use it, no such luck. Again, all it displayed was NO PILOT.
With the S100 autopilot remote out of commission, Anne had no autopilot on the flybridge where she does most of her driving. The lower helm hard wired ST6002 head unit still worked fine.
In this video, I go through how I hacked the autopilot wiring to allow us to use the ST6002 head unit both on the bridge and below. I also made a suction cup magnetic mount for it out of some old rear-view camera parts I had kicking around.
Autopilot Hack for Broken S100 Wireless Remote
So far, my rewiring has worked well on a 4-hour cruise, and Anne is most pleased with the new setup and having her autopilot function back up and running. Now we must decide if we want to spend nearly $500 for a new S100 remote when we return from our trip.
