And I was able to do this way too easily, thanks very much Raymarine! Ok so we're up on the east coast of Tas enjoying a 10 day break. Anchored off Orford and sitting out a blustery southerly change. I went ashore to the cafe and I was thinking it would be nice to be able to monitor the boat position on my iPhone while ashore. So when I came back onboard I fired up the chart plotter (a-series) to see if there was a way to do this, i.e. linked to WiFi and running Raycontrol software on my iPhone maybe? Anyway I pressed the on button on the plotter and the screen brightness was turned down really low, I couldn't really see anything properly in the bright light. Normally a shortcut for adjusting brightness is to hit the power button once then again to increase brightness, each subsequent press increases by 10 or so percent. But what happened instead, because the system was still booting up, was to initiate a "power on reset" function, the second press of the button (that I thought would increase brightness) instead chose option 1 - factory reset and started a countdown phase of 7 seconds. I couldn't read any of this properly and so I didn't realize what was taking place. All I could see was that it had entered some kind of boot up menu and I just left it to start up normally. It did, but it had blown away all my settings and restored back two versions of the software, mid 2016.

Two questions come to mind:

1. Is there any way to do a "restore to last known good configuration" type of recovery?

2. If not, will my auto pilot, ais and radar all need setting up from scratch again?

No I didn't have a backup of routes, waypoints etc unfortunately. Wondering more about the configuration settings for autopilot etc and if I'll need to re-commission the whole system?

2bish said..
No I didn't have a backup of routes, waypoints etc unfortunately. Wondering more about the configuration settings for autopilot etc and if I'll need to re-commission the whole system?

An argument there against integrating everything. One goes down, the lot go down.

Just an update. Got the set up done on the plotter again easily enough. Reconnected the WiFi radar, if you ever have problems connecting one of these, it's because they go into a sleep mode after 10 minutes when doing the initial set up with the plotter. You have to depower the whole system and then switch it on again to wake it up (only took me half an hour to work that out). I gave the boat a long run and the autopilot is working perfectly. So it seems like all the initial commissioning work has remained intact in the ACU for the autopilot, which is great! I did read that when one updates the Lighthouse operating system, the autopilot will need to be recommissioned again though, so I have that to look forward to. All in all, not the drama I was fearing, and importantly it won't effect our current trip.