Call me old fashioned but I want buttons .... have a friend with just a touch interface on his B&G system and I had a less than positive experience when I borrowed his boat. Would be fine down below at the chart table, but open to the elements I'm too much of a sceptic. How does yours hold up in rain and drizzle?
My plotter sits under the sprayhood, so it stays dry. But being old fashioned too I also didn’t want to rely on a touchscreen alone, which is why I added the keyboard, giving me the same functionality as an Axiom pro. The keyboard is mounted on the side of the plotter, just like the pro version.
The RM10 is the button pack that you can mount separately. The axiom+ with RM10 is way cheaper than the Pro. We have the 12" Axiom + RV. Very happy with it. We haven't had any issues with the screen like on the early versions but our Axiom is under thr sprayhood. I will be adding the RM10 to the steering binnacle so I can zoom in and out, etc from the wheel
We installed a s/h C80,as we couldn’t update the charts on our garmin
Yacht Devices do combined Device + Terminator, so it can replace a terminator on a system without needing any additional spurs. The devices that can do this have a "T" designation on the part no.
... hopefully Version 2 is a bit better ...
Current prices on SVB don't show that saving, probably because I intend to buy an AIS and a Radar bundle with each plotter .... e.g.
We purchased, 12" Axiom, ACU400 autopilot pack plus additional control head, 2x S70s, wind transducer set, depth and speed. Also an ITC5. The cost in the USA was £1500 cheaper than the UK. We we able to import it all to the Caribbean for very little cost. We were fortunate that our 4kw radar was digital so it all interfaced easily
It's not recommended as it can lead to baffling & difficult to diagnose faults. Discussed in this thread...
Replace with Garmin kit.
Now down to one, thanks for the advice ... also to @justanothersailboat ...
Can you quantify that? ... or is it a personal preference?
There are two sorts of preferences:
There is little to choose between them in terms of functionality, but in the UK Raymarine have a reputation for poor after sales service, in part because of the changes in ownership over the last few years whereas Garmin seem to be the opposite. I have had both and experienced the differences in service - fight with Raymarine and excellent service from Garmin. Raymarine have lost a lot of OE contracts to both Garmin and B&G, but always difficult to know the reasons.
I was going to do a seperate post on this and may well do so but we have a Garmin Inreach mini 2 purchased for our recent Atlantic crossing. The performance of this piece of kit was very poor. We have used the Delorme inreach purchased 10 years ago successfully over several long distance passages with minimal problems. Garmin purchased Delorme a few years ago and renamed the product as a Garmin. The new generation of Garmin equipment and the new Garmin app have proved poor compared to the old Earthmate app from the Delorme days. We had lots of issues communicating with our mini 2 on our recent passage. It want one problem. It was several. We also had problems communicating with friends also using a new mini 2 who left at the same time as us from Antigua. Both of us are very familiar with using the older Delorme kit.
So was it not sending messages via satellite when you hit the send button?
In my opinion the user interface is much better than Raymarine, I use both on different boats, and their implementation of NMEA 2000 is better.