I have had my share of problems with Auto pilots which used fluxgate compasses, and realize that there is still something to be desired with fluxgate technology, but in a well designed pilot, it can be quite accurate. I'm not holding my breath waiting for the magnetic poles to switch or the magnet fields to become too weak for the various compasses which we know of working from the magnetic fields to be unusable. I suspect that many generations of boats and boaters will come and go before any of these happen. (Estimated 1% loss of field strength in the last 100 years--but our measurements have become much better than they were 100 years ago...so. Scientific information is often taken to an extreme--for example the middle of the night radio show by Art Bell out of Parump NV. On the other hand--Loran C as we know it, may be an endangered technology. Although the repeatablity of Loran C signals is excellent, it is also subject to multiple errors. Peter makes some excellent points about having electroncis installed and working. I just spent 3 months putting all of the systems together on my new boat. I have been fooling around with electronics including designing some simple circuits and building some of my own gear from scratch for over 50 years. We should be entering an era of "plug and play" with NMEA 2000, but the manufactuers are not leading us that way....too much competition and trying to keep brand loyality. I had to laugh at a post on another list--touting the "Commercial grade" of Furuno Products being far superior than RayMarine--and exclaiming that anything made in Japan (using the Lexus car as an example) vs made in England(Using the Jaguar) was far superior. On a hunch, I looked at the back of my new Furuno Radar--yep--Made in Korea! It is not only putting the systems together, calibrating them, sea trialing them (I have had one transducer fail)--and then teaching the owner how to use them. I have a chartplotter--with a hard drive--which also uses Navionics chips. The manual tells how to bring up the tides and current from the Navionics chips--but not from the charts on the hard drive, so I had to contact the manufacturer which took two weeks for a reply. All of these very fancy and expensive electronics are compounding the issues of navigation in some ways, as they are appearing to make it easier. Look at how many boats still go on the rocks each year! I don't think that having satellite compasses will prevent these errors. Bob Austin