Today's post about the Garmin Autopilots had me thinking about something.
I put in all my NMEA2000 Maretron gear, but I still have an Alpha Marine 3000 autopilot that works fine and has it's own dedicated compass. I was planning to just to leave it that way since I only use it when motoring (so it's archaic power draw doesn't matter) and I plan to add a wind vane for sailing.
So my question is... could I feed an NMEA 0183 heading adjusted for wind angle to my AMS3000 and have it as a backup for sailing ? Is that something you can use an Actisense Gateway to do?
Just thinking out loud...
I don't think so, Patrick. I believe a pilot has to be designed to steer to an apparent wind angle that it receives via NMEA 0183, NMEA 2000, or some proprietary interface. I notice that the Alpha Marine 3000 "is not an 'interfaceable' pilot" according to its web page:
http://www.alphamarinesystems.com/sales_30002.htm