Stargazer wake edition or Hydrophase?
 

I am having trouble deciding what I want, so thought I would ask some opinions.

Hydrophase is paddle wheel. My concern is how accurate is this? And how long will work? I have a 01 Tige 21i and the speedo are paddle wheel and it seems I constantly need to adjust them. They are on the back of the boat though where Hydrophase is underneath so this may be better. Anyone know about this?

Far as Stargazer how is it for wakesurfing? and is it a pain for ballast? or going from wakeboarding to wakesurfing?

Any advise would be great. Thank you.

I don't ride rivers, so that won't be an issue for my decision.

Thanks for any and all help

I've never had a paddlewheel speed pickup but haven't heard of that many problems with it. That said the GPS puck has no moving parts and the pucks are standard ones that are mass produced by the tens of thousands for various applications outside of boat speed measurement/control. So, reliability is pretty good. I'm sure it has happened but I've never seen a report on the forums of a StarGazer GPS puck failure.

I have the StarGazer and it's great. I bought mine in early 2011 and it has never once dropped the signal or given any strange behavior. My neighbor had an '08 Nautique with a 1st generation revision of StarGazer. His, on the same waterway, tended to behave as if it lost the signal and then just cut throttle sometimes. I'm wondering if they just added some additional logic in their software to account for brief losses of GPS signal

For a DIY install the StarGazer is super simple. No hole in the hull and it works great if you're not dealing with a significant current.

RideSteady seems pretty good but the display seems to leave a bit to me desired. It's just a single like LCD calculator type display. It would get the job done for interfacing with the speed control system but I'd imagine isn't quite as good at acting as a plain ole speedometer when the system is off. With PP it shows the speed pretty large on the multiline display. If you've got a boat with dual speedometers and will only be replacing one this wouldn't really be an issue but I replaced my speedometer with my PP gauge.

RideSteady does have a more robust looking throttle servo though. Not sure what it's like in real life as I've only seen it in pics. The PP servo is a bit cheap and flimsy looking but seems to do the job fine.

RideSteady did go up in price though at $895 (-$100 if you send in pics of the install). So, there's not really that much savings there vs. finding a sale price on PP. IIRC RideSteady used to be under $700.

Oh, and it works great for surfing. For ballast if you make drastic changes to your weight you may have to adjust the KDW setting to cotnrol how aggressively it tries to maintain the speed but I pretty much never touch anything on mine once I found a KDW setting that I liked.

I don't really use the rider profile settings and just click the speed up and down to control the setpoint. If surfing I just click it down to 10.5 MPH or so. For wakeboarding bump it back up to 20-23 depending on the rider and ballast weight. You could save individual user's profiles and pick them from memory or you could setup a generic "surfing" and "wakeboarding" profile.

Thanks for the information!

Reason I am going with PP instead of Hydrophase:
- PP display is FAR nicer.
- Hydrophase gauge is only in a 3.5", I need a 5". PP also sells their gauges to match your factory ones, including the factory logo.
- No GPS on the Hydrophase

Sure, the Hydrophase is $200 - $300 cheaper, but that $300 buys a lot.

Just to let everyone know, I got the PP Stargazer. I didn't want to cut a hole and didn't want paddle wheel. Install took 3hrs but I took my time, didn't rush it. Once at lake just input speed I wanted and the system did the rest. It worked awesome!!! I don't know how I got along w/out it! Worked great for wakesurfing too!!!