Your ship's automation system is 20 years old. The maker wants to sell you a new one. We find out what's actually wrong first.
Legacy marine automation — governors, remote control systems, safety systems — often outlives the engineers who originally commissioned it. When something fails, the manufacturer's easiest answer is a full system replacement: expensive, disruptive, and not always necessary.
We work at the component level. Real diagnosis on the actual fault, not a blanket recommendation built around what's easiest for the maker to support.
One precisely identified fault costs a fraction of a full retrofit.
Obsolete doesn't mean unfixable.
A ship's automation system throws an intermittent fault. The crew works around it for months, sometimes years. The manufacturer attends, replaces a major component, and the fault comes back — because the actual cause was never in what got replaced.
Eventually the advice becomes: replace the whole system and the cabling. It's the safe answer for a manufacturer whose own service engineers no longer have deep familiarity with legacy gear — but it's rarely the cheapest fix, and it's not always the correct one.
What real diagnosis looks like
A decade-old intermittent fault, traced to one card
A container ship's bridge maneuvering control had an intermittent fault going back years. The vessel's own engineers, and the original equipment maker on multiple visits, tried parameter adjustments, cable checks, and eventually recommended a full system and cabling replacement.
Working from the maker's own service history, the actual signal path was traced channel by channel — cross-referencing decades-old schematics, physical board inspection, and direct current-loop measurement — down to a single adaptor card carrying an out-of-range signal. A precise, sourceable component, not a system-wide problem.
Exactly what happens
Send what you have
Service history, alarm logs, photos of the equipment — whatever exists. No need to reconstruct the whole story first.
Trace the actual fault
Real schematics, real board-level inspection, real measurement — not a guess and not a generic parts list.
One clear recommendation
What's actually wrong, what it costs to fix precisely, and how that compares to the manufacturer's own quote.
Deep experience with the equipment other engineers have moved on from
Decades of hands-on marine electronics and automation work — governors, remote control systems, safety systems, and the analog signal paths underneath them that most current service engineers never learned in the first place.
No platform change assumed. No transformation project. Just an honest answer to "what's actually wrong," and what it takes to fix it properly.
Bring the fault that keeps coming back
Tell us what's failing, what's been tried, and what the manufacturer has said. A few lines are enough to start — leave your email and we'll reply personally.