Updating the Electronics

Hi All,

I am in the process of updating all the main electronics; radar, gps, chart plotter, depth etc.

Any thoughts, opinions or comments on the various manufactures? Any one of the big companies to avoid?

Thanks,

Chris
41 Defever

If you want to go first class look at Furuno.

Otherwise all the major players make some nice stuff. Go play with it at a couple of electronic stores if you can to get a feel for it.

If you're on a budget look at the stuff from Standard Horizon. Lot of bang for your buck with their stuff IMO.

Does Standard Horizon have a radar system? I was hoping to avoid mix match products if possible.

Do you want MFD based system or a computer based system? Lots of options. What is the budget?

You can spend 2k to 50k depending on your needs.

Personally I have a 10" Furuno based system (Flybridge system), with two Mac Mini's running 3x21" screens and 2 copies of Nobletec. Furuno VHF blackbox (pilot house), standard horizon vhf with AIS (Flybridge), furuno HD radar, Furuno DFF1 sounder, multiple touch screens (chetco 5.7" switch and NMEA 2k display) iPads running NMEA remote for Flybridge display coming from chetco NMEA 2k to wireless gateway. Chetco sea switch analog engine gateway and analog switch system for ship controls.

I can pretty much do everything but start my engines from my iPhone.

On the flip side you can get a pretty good Garmin system with sounder, transducer, GPS, radar for about 4k.


I'm a gadget geek and started fresh so I built the what I am pretty happy with. I love the nobletec system and the large displays, I like the remote/wifi features and using 300$ iPads as displays (I have 6 of them all over the boat showing weather, cameras, switch controls, and showing mapping data). I might consider a different alarm/engine monitoring system if I had it to do again, but all else is good.

I am helping a buddy who has a 36' bayliner and wants a good but economical system. I am recommending a Garmin system with iPad for Flybridge running Garmin Helm/blue charts system. 4-5k including radar, side/down vue sounder, and 8" touch screen display, transducer. Hard to beat feature price comparison of that.

Everyone has their favorite and it likely is what ever they just dropped big bucks for, including me, but from what research I did, you want solid, go Furuno, you want ease of use and good features, go Garmin. If you have a laptop or have room for large monitors, pretty tough to beat features of Nobletec.




Sent from my iPhone using Trawler Forum

I just went through the selection and fit out of electronics for a new boat, followed by the removal and return of all the navigation electronics and replacement with something that actually works. The whole process is in my blog at MVTanglewood.com. Over on the right are Categories, and if you click on Electronics it will get you all the relevant posts (I think). Unfortuneately, blogger insists of sorting all posts in reverse chronological order, so you can either read the story backwards, or you need to work your way back in time, then read forwards. Sorry it's so awkward. Maybe someday Blogger will fix it.

The short answer to your question is:

Don't Buy Simrad. It's loaded with bugs and they are much more interested in adding new features (and more bugs) than fixing the stuff that's broken. And their tech support is completely useless.

ChrisL said:

I was hoping to avoid mix match products if possible.

Click to expand...

That was the approach I took; except for the two new VHF radios, everything else is from the same manufacturer. And even though I didn't do everything all at once (for time and cash flow management), I also had the same installer put it all together... which was well worth the cost anyway.

I shopped brand-agnostic, but ended up with Furuno because that let me build in some redundancy by using a couple bits of the previous installation (notably, the radar, which is functioning fine even though not quite as integratable (?) as would be newer units).

And then I also shopped for installers by first doing a local area market survey, and then kinda putting out an RFP to the three top contenders. Didn't decide on installer based on price, although my guys did come in mid-range.

-Chris

ChrisL said:

Does Standard Horizon have a radar system? I was hoping to avoid mix match products if possible.

Click to expand...

http://www.standardhorizon.com/down....doc&FileContentType=application/octet-stream

ChrisL said:

Does Standard Horizon have a radar system? I was hoping to avoid mix match products if possible.

Click to expand...

I have Standard Horizon gear and have the 4kw open array MDS 10-5 on a cp590 12" display. I have a kvh1000 heading sensor so I can overlay radar if I want or run split screen, it uses the CMap Max charts. At this time on the bridge I have a 7" cp300i I use as a plotter, both also display AIS info via GX-2150 VHFs. For radar on the bridge I use a 7" Si-Tex Colormax. I have a 12" cp500 that I plan to mount on the bridge to replace the 7" Si-Tex, the cp500 will be radar + plotter functions. This way I can have options in what I display, 1 zoomed in and the other out, the main reason I went with the larger displays was for the larger screen while using radar. The 7" displays were hard on my old eyes and the larger screens are much easier to read. Make sure if you go with the Standard Horizon plotters you get the ones that support radar, I don't think their newest one do, I think they are the cpn touch screen series.
http://www.standardhorizon.com/inde...868B77CC24EF82D4880&DivisionID=3&isArchived=0