simrad NSS8 Sport Chartplotter
- Thread starter raindr
- Start date
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If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2008
- Messages
- 13,731
- Location
- California Delta
- Vessel Name
- FlyWright
- Vessel Make
- 1977 Marshall Californian 34 LRC
If you want Simrad, you better talk to fellow TFer, Twistedtree, or read his blog. Peter has some not-so-great recent experience with their high end system in a N60 and a great blog documenting the whole process.
twistedtree
Guru
My suggestions would be run, don't walk. And that's AWAY from Simrad, not towards the sale. My blog covers a lot of the horror story, but there's more that I still haven't written up.
You can also go read on TheHullTruth. They are all 25' fishing, fishing, fishing guys, which frankly is the target market for Simrad/Navico. One guy is rallying up a class action law suit. The company has a consistent pattern of announcing products and then not delivering them for as much as a year e.g. their forward sonar. But in the mean time lots of people buy their chart plotters in anticipation of the new feature, then wait, wait, wait. Another example is a low-end auto pilot that they released under the Lowrance brand. They took orders and customer's money, then were something like 6-9 months late delivering. And when they did deliver, the product has no instructions, tech support knew nothing about it, and it only worked with some of their chart plotters, not all those that it was advertized to work with. So now people are waiting for a software update so they can actually use the darn thing. And it sounds like that is now going to be months later than promised.
Oh, the latest on my boat is that I also got rid of the NSS7 that I had in my tender. I kept it because I had bought some charts for it and frankly place little demand on it. Show me a chart, my location, and the depth. The first time I used it the depth wouldn't work. Some google searching revealed an awkward incantation that you need to do to get it to work. It's apparently a known bug with a fix coming soon". Presto, problem solved - not. Next time I used it, no depth again. Re-performed the incantation, and nothing. Common guys, it's a freekin' depth sounder. Is it really that hard, and don't you test that before releasing a product? So, rather than going back down the Simrad black-hole trying to debug yet another problem, I torn it our and got rid of it. They did finally release the software update, and it broke a bunch of stuff for other people. Simrad then re-released the update either three or four times because each time is was so badly broken. I wasn't even willing to spend the time to try it.
You can also go read on TheHullTruth. They are all 25' fishing, fishing, fishing guys, which frankly is the target market for Simrad/Navico. One guy is rallying up a class action law suit. The company has a consistent pattern of announcing products and then not delivering them for as much as a year e.g. their forward sonar. But in the mean time lots of people buy their chart plotters in anticipation of the new feature, then wait, wait, wait. Another example is a low-end auto pilot that they released under the Lowrance brand. They took orders and customer's money, then were something like 6-9 months late delivering. And when they did deliver, the product has no instructions, tech support knew nothing about it, and it only worked with some of their chart plotters, not all those that it was advertized to work with. So now people are waiting for a software update so they can actually use the darn thing. And it sounds like that is now going to be months later than promised.
Oh, the latest on my boat is that I also got rid of the NSS7 that I had in my tender. I kept it because I had bought some charts for it and frankly place little demand on it. Show me a chart, my location, and the depth. The first time I used it the depth wouldn't work. Some google searching revealed an awkward incantation that you need to do to get it to work. It's apparently a known bug with a fix coming soon". Presto, problem solved - not. Next time I used it, no depth again. Re-performed the incantation, and nothing. Common guys, it's a freekin' depth sounder. Is it really that hard, and don't you test that before releasing a product? So, rather than going back down the Simrad black-hole trying to debug yet another problem, I torn it our and got rid of it. They did finally release the software update, and it broke a bunch of stuff for other people. Simrad then re-released the update either three or four times because each time is was so badly broken. I wasn't even willing to spend the time to try it.
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