Raymarine Autopilot "no drive detected"

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pete78

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Hi All,

I've recently bought a new to me boat with a Axiom MFD, and a Raymarine P70s autopilot. I had the autopilot engaging correctly 2 weeks ago and steering towards the correct heading, and I have it on good authority from a professional skipper that it was engaging correctly during a delivery trip under previous ownership approximately 7 weeks ago.

The trouble is that during a day trip this weekend, every time I engaged the autopilot I got a 'no drive detected' message followed by alarms on both the MFD and on the Auto pilot followed by a failure to move the drives and change heading. The trouble I now have is that the boat is new to me and this is the first time I've used an autopilot; My understanding from a bit of internet reading is that the Autopilot is joined together into a 12v system with an ACU, seatalk backbone, and a drive unit to move the outdrives?

do any kind soles have some pointers on how to diagnose what may be stopping the AP from talking to the drives and giving this message? I'm optimistic ( hopeful!) that this may just be a power / trip switch / fuse / connection type issue; I'm reasonably handy and have a voltmeter (!!), but would be really grateful if anyone could suggest the sort of places I should be looking and checking first?

thanks in advance
 
Last edited:
So! It turns out that if you turn on the big button called ‘autopilot’ the AP can see the drives! 🤬 😳thanks for jerbro and Paul for taking the time to reply- I’ve learnt something now!

Cheers Pete
 
Reckon it takes about a year to find out which does what etc , it took 6 months for me to summon up the courage to ask the broker what a flashing red light on the dash was for, perhaps boat about to sink or expensively cease to function in some way.
It turned out to be the bowthruster light indicating it was switched on.
Also do not be tempted to fiddle with electronic stuff to see how it works, if you have no idea what you are doing.
It will result in a couple of visits from your friendly local marine electronics chap in order to put it all right again and who will suggest you not touch it again.
 
oldgit said:
Reckon it takes about a year to find out which does what etc , it took 6 months for me to summon up the courage to ask the broker what a flashing red light on the dash was for, perhaps boat about to sink or expensively cease to function in some way.
It turned out to be the bowthruster light indicating it was switched on.
Also do not be tempted to fiddle with electronic stuff to see how it works, if you have no idea what you are doing.
It will result in a couple of visits from your friendly local marine electronics chap in order to put it all right again and who will suggest you not touch it again.
Click to expand...
yep, 100% agree, there has been several of those messages and calls to the broker, but at least I now feel like I've got to grips with most of the systems that are new to me with the new boat and not broken anything (yet).

The autopilot worked last weekend, I can't get it to auto advance to the next waypoint once one is reached, you have to confirm the auto pilot to re-engage towards the next one or it goes straight on. But from my reading, that seems like a default feature of the raymarine autopilot that can't be changed?
 
pete78 said:
yep, 100% agree, there has been several of those messages and calls to the broker, but at least I now feel like I've got to grips with most of the systems that are new to me with the new boat and not broken anything (yet).

The autopilot worked last weekend, I can't get it to auto advance to the next waypoint once one is reached, you have to confirm the auto pilot to re-engage towards the next one or it goes straight on. But from my reading, that seems like a default feature of the raymarine autopilot that can't be changed?
Click to expand...
Used to be the case, but... Automatic Autopilot Turning | Learning | Raymarine
 
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