Simrad OP-55 Portrait Remote Control for NEON OS Displays

The Simrad OP-55 Portrait remote control puts your NEON OS chartplotter right under your fingers, so you're not stretching across the dash every time you want to change a page or drop a waypoint. It's a hardwired keypad and rotary dial built for helms where the display sits a little out of reach, or where you'd rather run the boat by feel than by tapping a touchscreen with wet hands. Think of it as a second set of controls that talks to your Simrad displays natively over the network.

Here's where it earns its keep. Picture a center console in a following sea, spray coming over the bow, one hand on the wheel and the other reaching for the plotter. A touchscreen is great until the boat's bouncing and your fingers are soaked. That's when a physical rotary dial and dedicated keys make all the difference. You can spin through menus, zoom the chart, and confirm a selection without ever taking your eyes off the water for more than a second. Anglers running the boat solo love that. So do captains on express cruisers where the MFD is flush-mounted low in the dash.

The heart of the OP-55 is a high-quality aluminum control dial with built-in cursor functions. Spin it to move through menus or pan the chart, press it to select. There's also a customizable key you can map to whatever you reach for most, whether that's the sonar page, a man-overboard mark, or your radar overlay. The layout is clean and the keys are sized for gloved hands, which matters when you're offshore in cold weather.

One remote can run up to six compatible multifunction displays running NEON OS. That's a big deal on boats with more than one screen or more than one helm station. Rig it at the lower helm and control the flybridge plotter, or set up a dedicated control point at the companion seat so a mate can work the sonar while you drive. Because it connects over NMEA 2000, everything stays in sync across the network without a maze of extra cables.

The housing is machined aluminum in black, so it holds up to salt air and looks at home on a modern helm. It's built in portrait orientation, 2.4 inches wide by 5.9 inches tall and 1-3/4 inches deep, which is handy when dash real estate runs vertical and you're trying to fit it between other switches and gauges. If your helm layout runs horizontal, Simrad also makes a landscape version of this same remote, but this one is the portrait cut. It mounts two ways: flush into the dash for a clean built-in look, or surface-mounted with the included dash mounting kit.

On the install side, this is an NMEA 2000 device, so it drops onto your existing backbone. The box includes an N2K-T-RD network T-connector to tap the backbone, a keypad sun cover to protect the face when you're not aboard, and the dash mounting kit. A couple of things worth knowing before you cut. Measure your flush-mount cutout carefully, because the aluminum frame leaves little margin on a curved dash. Give the remote its own power tee on the NMEA 2000 network rather than sharing a crowded drop, and update your NEON OS displays to the latest firmware before you power the remote up for the first time. Do those three things and setup is genuinely quick.

A quick word on what this isn't. It's not a wireless handheld you toss in a tackle bag, and it won't add features your plotter doesn't already have. It's a wired control surface, plain and simple, and it works with Simrad displays on the NEON OS platform. If that's your setup, it's exactly right. If you're on an older Simrad operating system, check compatibility first, because NEON OS is the newer platform and this remote is built specifically for it.

Bottom line, if you run Simrad NEON OS displays and want real buttons and a dial at the helm, the OP-55 Portrait is the factory answer. It's the kind of upgrade you stop noticing after a week because it just feels like how the boat should have worked all along.