Marin says;
"I've said this before but in my opinion when it comes to radar there is Furuno and there are all the wannabees." Let me guess ... you've got Furuno. You're basically say'in all these other radar manufacturer's don't know what ther'e do'in.
No, I'm not saying the other manufacturers don't know what they're doing. Just that Furuno does it better, has been doing it longer, and has a tremendous amount of "experience" with a wide variety of radar applications, and what we hear is the best service and support organization in the industry (we haven't needed to find out for ourselves yet). When we were filming aircraft operations on board the
USS Constellation years ago the ship had its huge,-purpose built radar systems of course. But it had several off-the-shelf systems too. Guess what they were? Furuno.
Our boat came with a Raytheon CRT radar of 1980s vintage. It worked fine and we had no real reason to replace it until its CRT began to die. This is a non-repairable, non-replaceable part these days so we went in search of something to replace the whole system with. We would not even consider Raymarine because their reputation for reliabitiy, service and support was atrocious at that time. We would still not consider Raymarine because we continue to hear bad stories about their support and service from recent Raymarine purchasers (within the last three years or so) although the systems themselves sound quite impressive.
But we looked a the other options and Furuno was so far ahead of them in features and technology it wasn't even a contest. This was some six or seven years ago now and I realize that things change. But Furuno hasn't been standing still, either. They now have NavNet 3D which I admit I know nothing about although people like John Baker seem very impressed with it.
So yes, we have Furuno. In our opinions we would have been fools to have settled for anything else unless we couldn't have afforded Furuno.
We were actually only planning to replace the radar. The big GPS plotter we had installed when we bought the boat was late 90s technology but it worked fine, and still does although it's CRT green screen is not quite as bright as it used to be. But when we went into the local marine electronics store we use--- we will always support a local vendor over the internet or chain stores if we can--- he had a Furuno NavNet VX2 running on display. We made a very thorough comparison of the NavNet to the Furuno stand-alone radar systems and it was obvious to us that there was a major big benefit in getting a great radar and an excellent C-Map plotter in the same unit for not all that much money extra.
That's why I said before that if one simpy wants a plotter alone, there are other options worth considering than Furuno's plotters. Standard Horizon has impressed us the most, particularly because of their screen brightness. When the day comes that our older Echotec CRT plotter's screen becomes too dim for us we will most likely replace it with a Standard Horizon. I have been very impressed with the unit we put on our Arima.
I don't like overlaying radar on the plotter. We considered doing that with the Furuno NavNet but after looking in the store how it looks we both fellt the screen became so cluttered it would be more annoying than useful. So when we want to be to compare the radar returns to the plotter we split the screen on the Nav Net and put the plotter display in heading up rather than north up. By setting similar ranges in both the radar and the plotter it is an easy matter--- for us anyway--- to mentally superimpose one onto the other without either display becoming overly cluttered.
