Raymarine Electronics....

[ACE]

Ok everything almost done (except the stuff I’m leaving for the winter months) and I am now away to upgrade all the Raymarine electronics. As I am going to the show next week is it worthwhile purchasing this at the show or are there better deals to be had?

Currently I have the Raymarine E80 and I am going to upgrade to the E120W touch screen but go with the HD or the super HD ? Does anyone have any knowledge or recommendations for or against either ?

Also I’ve looked at both the Radome Radar as opposed to the Open Array Radar and I’m not sure the difference between them ?

Any guidance/help or recommendations will as always be appreciated.

 

[PaulGooch]

Ok everything almost done (except the stuff I’m leaving for the winter months) and I am now away to upgrade all the Raymarine electronics. As I am going to the show next week is it worthwhile purchasing this at the show or are there better deals to be had?

Currently I have the Raymarine E80 and I am going to upgrade to the E120W touch screen but go with the HD or the super HD ? Does anyone have any knowledge or recommendations for or against either ?

Also I’ve looked at both the Radome Radar as opposed to the Open Array Radar and I’m not sure the difference between them ?

Any guidance/help or recommendations will as always be appreciated.

Yeah, walk past the Raymarine stand and go see the nice guys at Garmin.

Last time i spoke to Raymarine support, plotter was losing position fixes, the numbscull the other end told me "perhaps Offcom turned some of the satellites off". I kid you not, i swear that's what he said.

 

[Hurricane]

I know there are a few on here that would dissagree with me but I wonder if "touch screen" is really worth it.

Imagine bumping along in a rough sea - can you actually manage the controls of a "touch screen" plotter. IMO physical buttons are less likely to get pressed accidentally.

Also I believe you have to sacrifice brightness when you move to touch screen and these screens are hard enough to see in full sunlight as it is.

Personally, I would stick with the standard E series - do they have remote keyboards like our G series? IMO it would be better to spend the money on remote keyboards - we hardly ever press the wrong button.

Radar
The wider the scanner - the better the radar sensitivity.
Open arrays (obviously) have larger scanners so will see smaller/weaker targets.
Dont forget to add a good heading sensor to the system so that MARPA can be as accurate as possible - we always use MARPA on larger passages - helps decide if its safe to pass infront of shipping etc (using CPA).

 

[z1ppy]

Last time i spoke to Raymarine support, plotter was losing position fixes, the numbscull the other end told me "perhaps Offcom turned some of the satellites off". I kid you not, i swear that's what he said.

Thats brightened my afternoon up no end!!!

i have only had recent experience of Garmin and they were very good but i thought i saw somewhere Raymarine were bringing out a new touch screen with hard buttons as well and Ipod type interface...

Sure Cookee will be along shortly to update as think he is a Raymarine Ambassador
now?

on the touch screen thing, i kinda agree with Hurricane. we had touch screens on the rib and they were good but difficult to use at any speed and needed "concentration" to make them work.

on the Hunton we have an older hard button Garmin unit and its easier to use at speed. the only down side is the screen is much smaller for the same size unit...

i guess the larger the boat the easier touch screen becomes and the ability to drag around the touch screen unit made passage planning on the boat and distance measuring much easier!

 

[MikeBrazier]

Imagine bumping along in a rough sea - can you actually manage the controls of a "touch screen" plotter. IMO physical buttons are less likely to get pressed accidentally.

I have looked into the newer Raymarine Widescreen stuff while doing some day dreaming, there are quite a few demo videos on YouTube showing them in use.

The touch screen seems to be designed for use in harbour or at rest, they have the facility to disable/lock that functionality, all features are controllable from the buttons directly whilst underway. They do not rely entirely on the touch screen feature.

Mike.

 

[admillington]

I have Garmin button operated units on the flybridge and a large touch screen at the lower helm and the mix works. The touch screen is great for plotting a course (in the dry and shade) and the button units (often wet with rain and a rare time in direct sunlight) good for switching chart resolutions or to the remote cameras.

 

[scej]

I would look at the Raymarine stand at the show they have a new series coming out and it looks to be a good piece of kit thatt you can connect loads of stuff to such as engine instruments etc if your kit will support it.

As for the touch screen side i'm not a fan really as in rough weather at speed they are not easy to use and the screens then have loads of fingerprints all over them so you cant see it properly in sunlight.. as for garmin well i think they made some good stuff but their touch screen stuff is not very good.

If i was looking to replace kit i think i would be looking at Raymarine and Furuno way before Garmin. I know i am about to be slated for that comment from people who have garmin kit but it is IMHO.

 

[aquapower]

The touch screens are not easy to use in rough weather, have used Raymarine and Garmin and have to say I prefer the Raymarine, have done several thousand miles with their kit on many different boats and not had any major problems, they are now about to release some pretty impressive new kit at the show and later in the year.

 

[jrudge]

I have a C120wide and other than the fact Raymarine kindly gave me a new one as it went awol I am very happy with it.

When I bought it the local Raymarine dealer - Lindon Lewis - reckoned it was better than the E120W, and it has the internal GPS which save a few pounds.

The screen size is really useful - I previously had an RL70c and it was too small!

I bought the platimum cartridge for about £175 which gives you 3d overlay, aerial photos etc. This stuff is quite good, but they give yo no instructions so I have found out by trial and error how it works! We go long distances and the ability to choose a harbour by aerial view rather than three stars at the top of the almanac is quite handy.

I was going to interface to the engine BUT it is (a) a £250 box. Fine no problem. Oh ands (b) a £250 software upgrade per engine , and oh you need some wires. No problem £10. errrrrr no about £170 for a seatalk network. I dont want a seatalk network I want to plug in one thing. So the bill was about £1000 for connecting to the engine - hence I still have the box in my desk drawer - if you need one PM me!

Finally where to buy it. I got mine of ebay for alot less than the dealers. It arrived the following day, was pretty much brand new and from a seller with a feedback score of about 500 so it is worth a go.

 

[jfm]

As far as I can tell, Raymarine's new products are the new i70 instruments that go where you woud have had st60 and st70, plus one new plotter called e7 which is very small so not relevant to big mobos. As far as I know, their current range of touch screen MFDs (plotters), E140W et al, are not being replaced.

I had 6 Raymarine st70+ 3 Raymarine E140W on last boat, and 6 Garmin touch screens + 8 of their little displays on current boat. Garmin is way better in a large number of areas. However one particular horrid thing about Raymarine's st70 little screens was that they were way too dim to see in sunlight, whereas Garmin's equivalent is very bright. Now that Raymaine have replaced those awful st70s with these new i70s I would say Raymarine is back in contention imho. The engine interfacing works well with both Ray and Garmin, I have found

I still think Garmin's big plotters (7015 et al) are better than Raymaine's e140W, but the difference isn't huge, and raymaine's HD super radars are the same standard as Garmin's, so imho Raymairine is back in contention (but that's all; they are not better). Various peripheral things, like say the windex, are much better from Garmin than Raymarine

I don't agree the claimed deficiencies of touchscreen written above. You can hit the buttons very easily in heavy sea or when hands are wet, and there is no brightness penalty. I much prefer touchscreen and no buttons (haivng tried buttons-only, Raymarine's hybrid, and Garmin's all-touch). When I had Raymarine's hybrid I found I only used the touchscreen not the buttons

Garmin's support is fantastic. Raymarine's was patchy - if you got a good guy on the phone you got lots of help but there weren't enough good guys

Although Garmin's gear works very well it needs a styling facelift of the casings (imho) to create the perfect ultra-modern dashboard

I wouldn't get furuno on a leisure boat. It works fine but the user interface is not as intuitive as Ray or Garmin. And, based only on a play at Cannes boat show last week, I don't rate the new Simrad (which is a belnd of touch screen plus a few buttons) - it is a non intuitive interface but Simrad has always been non intuitive

All imho

Ref ACE's question, the open scanner has a finer beam angle (about 2 degrees on both Ray and Garmin, on the 4 foot scanner) than the radome (about 4 degrees) so has better resolution ie it can pick out lots of little targets separately rather than merging them into a single blob