not being digital and linkable with autopilot which I dont currently have? I know that this is kind of a bottom fisihing product by the price compared to Raymarine and Simrad etc which are interlinkable. I have a nice but older (1967) Tartan 27 and while I would love a tiller pilot I am not prepared to go the whole integrated route. The old VDO Sumlog lower propeller unit currently on my boat is more of a curiosity than a useful piece of equipment. Of course I could get a long piced of line and tie some knots in it and get a stopwatch! On an unrelated note, I just got back from Hawai'i and was impressed by any and all of the folks who braved the water in the central Pacific. The Coasties have a presence there and Alaska and I can say with certainty that working out there on the water is not a walk in the park even on calm days. There are whales all over the place now and waves and winds that could almost rival the north Atlantic. On a related note, does everyone know what Plimsole Marks are on commercial shipping vessels? The lowest mark is for WMA (winter in the North Atlantic), next comes the Pacific on down. A Brit named Plimsole (funny that this refers to a rubber shoe in England) came up with this scale that ships could not fill there ballasts any lower than the marks and Lloyds of London concurred. There were too many ships lost because of over stuffing their holds. Apparenty they believed that the sea state of the north Atlantic in winter was about the worst you would encounter anywhere in the world. I also noticed that the weatherfax sea state charts for the N. Atlantic are in meters whereas the Pacific is calibrated in feet. Go figure. A 20 meter wave is bigger than 60' by several feet. I wonder if this discrepancy is because of those Metric system users across the pond or they just like using smaller numbers to describe average wave height.