Northstar Pilot, a Navman winner
The wise judges of the DAME Design Awards have spoken, and the winner of the marine electronics category is Navman’s G-Pilot 3380. “This is an extremely cohesive product, with an attractive case design, intuitive controls and clear graphic displays on a 3.8in LCD colour screen that include animations, help prompts and a user-friendly compass page.” I’ve raved about this interface before and am pleased to note that it is now also available on the new Northstar 3300 autopilot, with a casing “system matched” to Northstar’s 6000i displays. The two sister companies are a little shy about this duplication, because otherwise their products are quite distinct, but, heck, why not? (Note that I have not tryed the Navman/Northstar pilot on the water, and doubt the judges did either. And even if we had, pilots can perform fine on one boat but not another. All of which is why it’s so hard to introduce a new autopilot.)
The winner of the Marine related software category is Navionics Platinum, which makes sense to me, and relevant Special Mentions include Airmar’s WeatherStation, Simrad’s SART, and something called Octoplex from Moritz Aerospace. I haven’t mentioned the latter yet, but got a good introduction at Lauderdale and agree with the Dame guys about its specialness. More to come.
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We have the previously badged Navman 3380 autopilot system, basically the identical unit mentioned here. We've had the system in our Hans Christian 33 sailboat for three years now. Having sailed from Texas to Florida, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and now here in Panama the unit has performed flawlessly. Love it. And the customer service and tech support from Northstar is top notch. Would definnatley buy again.