Which new instrument system, B&G Triton or Raymarine?

I have had the B&G Triton for over a year now. They are simply great, but....

I also have a P70 Raymarine Autopilot head, and a Raymarine C90W plotter - you can't group the lighting levels, which is a nuisance.

So, if I was repeating the exercise, I would have gone for the B&G Autopilot control too.

The Triton displays are fully sunlight viewable and are very configurable too. But aren't they all now?

You wont need 5 of them!!!, I manage with 2.
 
Just bought Raymarine i50 sounder and log with i60 wind to replace a mish mash of Raymarine/Navico and NASA. Just keeping the existing ST4000 autopilot display. Had the old ST 50 Raytheon units on a previous boat and never had a problem.
 
FullCircle said:
I have had the B&G Triton for over a year now. They are simply great, but....

I also have a P70 Raymarine Autopilot head, and a Raymarine C90W plotter - you can't group the lighting levels, which is a nuisance.

So, if I was repeating the exercise, I would have gone for the B&G Autopilot control too.

The Triton displays are fully sunlight viewable and are very configurable too. But aren't they all now?

You wont need 5 of them!!!, I manage with 2.
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Thanks, that's useful. I realise we could 'manage' with two, or possibly even with one. But if we are going to spend £4-5000 on a coordinated system we would prefer not to have to peer at little digital displays hiding in the corner of another instrument. We may settle for four, going to speak to a dealer today for some impartial advice.
 
I have just replaced a Raymarine plotter with a B&G plotter plus Simrad 3G radar. So I have a mixture of ST60 instruments, older simrad robertson pilot ( brilliant kit and the thing that pushed mne towards simrad/ B&G) plus the new kit. It has been an obect lesson in what not to do because I now have instruments talking seatalk, some klit using nmea 0183 and other bits using NMEA 2000. Wioth the help of a multiplexer / converter box from Brookhouse in NZ ( good outfit to deal with) they are all talking to each other but with limitations. In addition the B& G plotter is not as well programmed as the Raymarine it replaced. Sure it has lots of fancy capability that you dont want - ability to act as a hifi or as a video, but basics like the routing program are inferios.

I would not trust Garmin for a moment. I still remember them dropping their customers in the doo doo when they changed charting systems and as the archytypal yankees rapacious corporation I have no doubt they will do it again.

My recommendation would be to replace the lot with modern kit chosing whats best in each area and basing your network on nmea 2000. If you dont want to go that far then go raymarine since their kit is either the best or next best in every area.

As for instruments, I use the wind one, the pilot one, the repeater and the depth. Occasionally the log
 
pvb said:
No, that's incorrect. The company's headquarters are in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. The "Corporate and Operational" headquarters are in Kansas.
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They've been incorporated in Switzerland since 2010, which might make them legally Swiss, but....

Previously they were in the Caymans, which probably didn't make them sing Calypso. They were founded in the US (Lenexa, Kansas) and no doubt have a culture that is heavily American (not excluding a propensity for manufacturing in the Far East).
 
birdseye said:
I would not trust Garmin for a moment. I still remember them dropping their customers in the doo doo when they changed charting systems and as the archytypal yankees rapacious corporation I have no doubt they will do it again.
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I use a sat-nav product called Co-Pilot on my phone - cost me £35 for the whole of Europe including lifetime updates. A year or so ago Garmon bought the product or company (not sure which) - immediately the cost went up and the app, which I could install across multiple devices (and was licenced as such) was restricted to one device. No warning and no enhancements to the product at all (and there still hasn't been any enhancements over a year later).

It's made me wary of Garmin again - strange that a company so good with reactive customer support (e.g. when things break, etc.) gets it so wrong when it comes to the other aspects of looking after the customer.
 
We have looked at Raymarine, Garmin and Triton/Zeus today. I like the look of the B&G very much, instrument display is superb, very bright and readable from almost any angle. The Zeus2 seems to give us all we want but I didn't go as far as plotting a route. For Greece we find Navionics HD cartography on the iPad to be far superior to the Garmin Blue Charts we have on the plotter, so hopefully this would be equally good in the Gold version.

We didn't like the Raymarine i70 at all, small display and not intuitive to me. The i50 and 60 displays were as poor as our current B&G H1000, so definitely not going for them. The plotter looked OK and was easy to use.

The current Garmin 1020 plotter seems to offer nothing that our old 2010 doesn't have already, except a touch screen, and apart from that seemed nowhere near as easy as to operate as our old one. I agree the instrument displays are good but I want to get away from their charts.

Looks like it's going to be B&G.
 
vyv_cox said:
The current Garmin 1020 plotter seems to offer nothing that our old 2010 doesn't have already, except a touch screen, and apart from that seemed nowhere near as easy as to operate as our old one. I agree the instrument displays are good but I want to get away from their charts.
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As the Garmin instruments are NMEA2000, you can use them with other plotters.

Incidentally, the Garmin 1020 plotter isn't touch screen. I have the similar 820.
 
pvb said:
As the Garmin instruments are NMEA2000, you can use them with other plotters.

Incidentally, the Garmin 1020 plotter isn't touch screen. I have the similar 820.
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Yes, but I want the facility to see instrument outputs at the chart table, where the plotter is. I guess it might be possible to do this by mixing and matching but it is surely a lot easier with an integrated system. The Zeus does a lot of very clever stuff (which we never knew we needed!) that would certainly not be available using somebody else's plotter.

We saw so many that I am probably mistaken about the touch screen. I thought it far less easy to use than our 2010, although some of that is no doubt familiarity. Other than the facility to do things we don't want, like photographs of harbours and coloured underwater contours, it seemed to be only a re-ordering of buttons and controls. We know that the latest cartography of the Aegean is identical to what we already have, except possibly buoyage around Athens(?) which is of no interest.
 
Vyv,

I did a delivery trip for FullCircle this weekend just gone, and I have to say, I think you've made a good decision there..his B&G instruments are absolutely superb.

I'd second his comment that you don't need more than two though... they can be set ip very easily to show everything you need without having to squint... for example a split log/depth on one display and wind on the other...and one button press to pull up lat:lon for example... I particularly liked the history screen for depth.

Really really nice bits of kit.
 
vyv_cox said:
Other than the facility to do things we don't want, like photographs of harbours and coloured underwater contours, it seemed to be only a re-ordering of buttons and controls. We know that the latest cartography of the Aegean is identical to what we already have, except possibly buoyage around Athens(?) which is of no interest.
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The photos, etc, are specific to the chart cartridge you buy. You can buy a cheaper Garmin cartridge which just has the cartography.
 
Phoenix of Hamble said:
Vyv,

I did a delivery trip for FullCircle this weekend just gone, and I have to say, I think you've made a good decision there..his B&G instruments are absolutely superb.

I'd second his comment that you don't need more than two though... they can be set ip very easily to show everything you need without having to squint... for example a split log/depth on one display and wind on the other...and one button press to pull up lat:lon for example... I particularly liked the history screen for depth.

Really really nice bits of kit.
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Thanks for the confirmation! So far as the numbers of displays is concerned, it may be different on a wheel steered boat. With a tiller it is a couple of paces to press the buttons, letting go of the tiller to do so. Having had the full set of five shown above for 20 years it would come as something of a shock to go to two. Speed is so much easier to read on an analogue dial than digits (hated the digital display on some Fiat cars). With wind we might decide on just one. We would regard the data repeater on its own as essential, as the plotter is below at the chart table. So probably four or five.
 
I have B&G Triton's and they're excellent. WAY better viewing than Garmin's offering having also sailed on a boat with Garmin this summer. Easy to setup (I found) and very flexible.

EDIT: Vyv, you can have an analogue speed I think, download the full manual from B&G and it'll tell you.
 
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This is all very useful information guys. Thank you very much. We are in much the same position as Viv, except we have 12 yr old Raymarine/Raytheon kit. I'm just changing the GPS sensor and log impeller at the moment in an attempt to keep the legacy stuff going but the time is coming for a full change. But the gps has to have a conversion kit from Seatalk NG to my old Seatalk and I will lose some background info screens (no of satellites locked on etc).

By the way, someone expressed concern about Garmin changing their charting. Raymarine did the same thing a few years ago moving from C Maps to something else (Navionics?). I don't think that makes either of them bad people though! It's not like they have been changing every 10 minutes.

Looks like I will be going with B&G next time.
 
bob234 said:
By the way, someone expressed concern about Garmin changing their charting. Raymarine did the same thing a few years ago moving from C Maps to something else (Navionics?). I don't think that makes either of them bad people though! It's not like they have been changing every 10 minutes.
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The issue wasn't that they had changed the cartography on thier new plotters, it was that at the same time they stopped supporting their old (proprietary) format so anybody with the older equipment could no longer get chart updates and the like.

Edit: As aside I replaced my ST60/C120 set up with i70s and a C125 and am perfectly satisfied with both of them although the i70s seem a little less capable than the Triton alternatives - however B&G seem to expect you to by an autopilot keypad and a seperate display unit rather than the combined unit that Raymarine offer?
 
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