autopilot - autopilot swinging wildly

[Jcat2010]

Everything was fine when I had the tug out a few weeks ago.

Today, all was well until I engaged the autopilot. The boat swung suddenly to port, then back to sbd. Quickly disengaged. Shut everything off, restarted, still doing it. Planing speed or at no wake - same effect. Steering fluid is fine, manual steering is fine. But it's like the autopilot suddenly has a mind of its own.

Garmin says need to recalibrate the Reactor 40. Anyone have any similar experience ? Do they just up and decide to start misbehaving ? Any idea what could have set it off ?

It was late in the day, so I just put her back in the creek and will troubleshoot next week.

Joe

 

[S. Todd]

First easy thing is to make sure you have not accidently placed something next to the Garmin compass (not the one on the dashboard) that is throwing it off. Once had granddaughter's electric toothbrush placed next to the compass in the mid-cabin of our R25 Classic. Garmin screen and resulting autopilot was totally confused. Moved the toothbrush a couple feet away and all was good.

 

[az9133bm]

Likely, you'll need to perform the configuration process. https://static.garmin.com/pumac/Reactor_40_Mechanical_Configuration_Guide_EN.pdf

We recently upgraded our chart plotter and NMEA 2000 bus. Certainly, configuration was needed in our case. Before we did the "In Water" portion of the process, we engaged the autopilot and the system behaved exactly as you described above.