Nav pilot 700

[Sebongie]

Installed on Hallberg Rassy 46 sailboat.
Dockside test shows rudder deadband is “Too Big”
Not sure where the play in our shaft (Lewmar/Whitlock is)
Switching to set deadband on Manual, the setting appears to have been 1.7 degrees
I have set to 0.7 degrees and will see if the boat hunts
It also had a problem with going out of control at sharp waypoint turns...would these be related?
Will full auto learn not to do this?
Thanks for any help
Tom

 

[Johnny Electron]

The rudder deadband issue is related to the poor steering.
When you saw the error message “Rudder deadband is too big” it means there is too much slop in the system to control the boat correctly. This could be that the pump is the wrong size for the install, air in the system, loose linkage, old expanding hoses or other issues. Ideally the first thing to check is if the the rudder speed is within 7 to 12 seconds hard over time. 10 sec second hard over to hard over is normally what you want. If you have to run manual deadband you are putting a band-aid on what ever the problem is. There is some sort of steering delay or sloppiness. The more it is out the more the boat will be S'ing. Even if you have 10 second hard over time you can have excessive delay in the response time of the command being provided to the steering, before the steering moves. These delays are not good. Think of it like an old car with a play in the steering wheel. You move the wheel and the car doesn't move so you turn more and eventually it catches and normally over-steers and you have to go back through the dead area to before you can get the steering wheel to go the other direction. Deadband.. dead steering response time is not good if you want good straight steering. Auto learning happens in the first 5 mins of operations and it won't fix deadband issues.