Thoughts on MFDs and Radar?

I will be replacing a 20 year old radar and plotter with new this winter and am interested in your recommendations for a recreational coastal cruiser aboard a 42' Bristol. Would love to get two mfds (bridge and main helm) and radar. What are you pleased with and what should I steer away from?

As I have said many times before. I always recommend Furuno systems, they have always had the best customer service and support.

Hard to argue against Fruno. Others are cheaper but are they a better value?

My Raymarine system is now 20 years old and has always done the job. While I can’t see any justification for replacing it, I also can’t say I would go with Raymarine again. So often the decision has a lot to do with what is on sale.

Gotcha and Azzurra, Thanks for the comments about Furuno. I'm relatively new to TrawlerForum and appreciate your speedy response.

I went with Garmin, I found it easy to understand and use. I have never used Furuno so I have no input on that.

I have had excellent support from Raymarine. I have had them in our last 4 or 5 boats. They replaced an 8+ year old depth sounder module because they had issues with that particular unit. But it was 8 years old, who does that? I like the new wireless Quantum 2 radars. You only have to run power to the unit, no big data cable plug. And it only uses 17 watts of power.

I like my 4-year old Simrad system but I have to admit that tech support is positively awful. I'd avoid them for that reason alone.

Not the questions you asked, but are you sure you need the upgraded electronics? In my opinion, few owners really need the robust electronics they have aboard. They may want the cool stuff, but need it for their boating? Nope.....

Peter

I had Raymarine systems in most of my boats over the past 25 years and have been very pleased with them.

Had a Simrad system in my last boat, and it's the last time I buy anything made by Simrad. The equipment was unreliable and full of bugs, and the service support was inexcusably terrible. After a few repair attempts they basically gave up, left me with a dysfunctional system, and told me to sue the company if I wanted. Never again.

Current boat has a Garmin setup. I compared Garmin with Raymarine, very similar capabilities and prices. The Garmin system seemed to be a little more flexible in terms of how the MFDs could be configured, so I went with that. Some commands are not intuitive or buried behind non-obvious menu choices, but overall works well.

mvweebles said:

Not the questions you asked, but are you sure you need the upgraded electronics? In my opinion, few owners really need the robust electronics they have aboard. They may want the cool stuff, but need it for their boating? Nope.....

Peter

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This is why I am running a 20 year old system. By today's standards its missing a lot of bells and whistles. However, I bought it because it had all the latest bells and whistles at the time. While I find color to be an extremely important upgrade I have found chart/radar overlay to be much less important than I had thought. What I did find to be more important was adding a second MFD to each helm were I could have one unit focusing on Radar and the other on Navigation or I could have one focused on close proximity while the other was looking at a bigger picture to keep track of traffic.

Currently the only feature that I feel like I am missing is the color coding of radar traffic based on closing or expanding range.

Thanks for all of the responses and helpful ideas. The current system is kaput so need the upgrade. I really appreciate your help.

mvweebles said:

I like my 4-year old Simrad system but I have to admit that tech support is positively awful. I'd avoid them for that reason alone.

Not the questions you asked, but are you sure you need the upgraded electronics? In my opinion, few owners really need the robust electronics they have aboard. They may want the cool stuff, but need it for their boating? Nope.....

Peter

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My wife says if I want something for the boat that I need it…

This boat came with a Garmin RADAR and MFD. OK, not particularly intuitive, for me. Garmin tech support answered an early question I had, so that was a good sign.

I replaced the other non-functioning original MFD with Furuno, and if the Garmin RADAR craps out I'll replace that pair with Furuno too. Furuno offers two kinds of tech support, one being real, no-kidding, Furuno people... and the other being a Furuno USA sponsored forum. Both excellent.

And then there's Nobeltec's TimeZero, a Windows/Mac application (or TZ iBoat, an iThing app) directly compatible with Furuno stuff. Happens we use TZ on a Windows laptop down below as a third level of backup, but if we had a lower helm we could probably just build that into the plan in place of another MFD.

-Chris

Thanks, Chris, It seems that Furuno wins the service and support award despite being slightly more expensive than the others. That's worth the extra expense in my opinion.

If you look around, you can find Furuno gear on sale.

tsvanwin said:

Thanks, Chris, It seems that Furuno wins the service and support award despite being slightly more expensive than the others. That's worth the extra expense in my opinion.

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I've been pleased, but then again we switched to Furuno on the previous boat in 2009-ish when "time zero" (I think perhaps referring to instantaneous screen refresh) was first becoming a thing... so by now, it's what I'm used to and I don't have too much recent experience with other makers.

The Cetrek plotter that came on that boat more often took 3-½ days to redraw the screen, and Cetrek disappeared anyway...

The early Garmin support for their systems on this "Heinz 57" boat was decent, but then I found they also charge for annual chart updates... unlike Furuno's older NOAA chart system with free annual updates.

(Not sure how Furuno updates for the optional paid C-Map charts worked; didn't have those. Also, not yet sure how the newer Furuno/MapMedia charts -- I think maybe only available in the new XL systems, newer than ours -- will be updated. Our recent TimeZero laptop upgrade came with both charting systems, user selectable, so I'm guessing there's some carry-over like that to the new XL release too.)

More recently, I've asked Raymarine a couple questions while we troubleshoot an actual glitch on our controller and as we looked into maybe improving our Furuno MFD-Raymarine AP interaction. (Remembering that Heinz 57" thing.)

Both times, decent answers. Ref the glitch, they recommended having the existing unit repaired, and they explained why. Ref the potential improvement -- which I thought might have involved sending feedback from AP to MFD via NMEA0183, via a translator to NMEA2000 -- they opined no significant improvement, don't spend the time/money. Both answers, decent enough. During all that, I saw there is (or at least was) a Raymarine forum online somewhere too, although I didn't happen to see anything already posted that would have been relevant to my questions.

Anyway... all this amplification in case useful...

-Chris

Simrad here. Installed last year.

Big believer there is no one best choice.

Used support once. A two hour hold to get a rep and did boat chores while on hold. Had my answer in 15 minutes once I got through.

Do you want plug and play, or the ability to customize a lot of settings? If you choose settings control keep a manual close at hand. If you choose plug and play be sure you like what they give you.

Figure out what features are most important to you and optimize around that.

Garmin or Raymarine. Good customer support. Made by them. Others may be a mixture who makes it and components may not match.

We replaced a 30-yr old Furuno radar with the wireless DRS4W. No need for a dedicated MFD (although you can use one if you prefer) as the system transmits to two iOS devices simultaneously. We have a navigation iPad in the pilothouse, and I can take my phone with me to the flybridge. Plus, as mentioned, you can run TZ iBoat and the radar overlays on the charts and satellite images.

Not a fan of radar overlays. The screen gets too cluttered and small nearby stuff can easily get missed. I prefer a side by side view of similar range with the chart on Head Up. Easy to compare to the radar. I do like MARPA tracking.

I had an old, green CRT radar from WW2. Worked great. Highly recommend it

... or maybe I meant to say "don't recommend it." You choose!

Agree with Furuno recommendations. I am an all Furuno boat and love their products and support. Have to ask yourself why most of the commercial fishing boats generally have Furuno.

Comodave said:

I have had excellent support from Raymarine. I have had them in our last 4 or 5 boats. They replaced an 8+ year old depth sounder module because they had issues with that particular unit. But it was 8 years old, who does that? I like the new wireless Quantum 2 radars. You only have to run power to the unit, no big data cable plug. And it only uses 17 watts of power.

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I've never used Furuno, but I'm sure it's very high quality. But I do love the doppler aspect of our Quantum 2. It paints anything coming your way red, and anything moving away from you as green. It makes it very easy to determine who you should pay closer attention to when you're in a congested area.

Mako said:

I had an old, green CRT radar from WW2. Worked great. Highly recommend it

... or maybe I meant to say "don't recommend it." You choose!

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The RADAR on our previous boat was already Furuno, CRT but newer than WWII. ,

Worked fine, actually. In some ways, advantages over color.

High Wire said:

Not a fan of radar overlays. The screen gets too cluttered and small nearby stuff can easily get missed. I prefer a side by side view of similar range with the chart on Head Up. Easy to compare to the radar.

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I don't usually like overlays either. Too much clutter.

OTOH, I can split our screen, straight RADAR on one side, RADAR/chart overlay on the other side. Both Head Up.

That lets me choose whether to put the other MFD -- chart or charts, depending on split -- on Head Up, or leave it on North Up, my usual preference.

-Chris

This is a bit of a Ford vs Chevy vs Ram discussion. Most people are loyal with what they started with. I've used Raymarine for years. I think Garmin is a bit more intuitive, but that's just my opinion. I don't like Simrad's policy of removing all parts from the market when a model goes EoL. It forces the upgrade over repair model. I don't have much experience with Furuno but it seems to be the favorite radar for commercial and fishing boats.

@ranger’s comments got me thinking about the pros and cons of a giant single MFD versus independent displays.

Or is this like starting another anchor thread???

Shrew said:

This is a bit of a Ford vs Chevy vs Ram discussion. Most people are loyal with what they started with. I've used Raymarine for years. I think Garmin is a bit more intuitive, but that's just my opinion. I don't like Simrad's policy of removing all parts from the market when a model goes EoL. It forces the upgrade over repair model. I don't have much experience with Furuno but it seems to be the favorite radar for commercial and fishing boats.

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I certainly don't disagree with your Ford, Chevy, Ram comparison. This is why I mentioned that what's on sale is often the biggest driver in which system is purchased. For longevity I certainly would look at Furuno. I however ended up buying a Raymarine system 20 years ago because they made me a deal that was unbelievably good. They then released their new system 6 months later but hey, it was 3 times what I had paid. What I will add is that all my Furuno equipment is from the 90's and it still works were my Raymarine equipment is starting to get glitchy while being a minimum of 10 years newer.

I just replaced my Radar and MFD on my boat. I went with the Simrad bundle which came with the HALO 20 radar, 9" MFD (which is plenty big enough) complete chartography as well as a new transducer for fish finding and depth. The entire system was only $1999 through The GPS Store and it was incredibly easy to install and set up. Everything works perfect and I really love the Radar, its super. I then purchased the Simrad AP44 autopilot and just plugged it into the NMEA 2000 backbone and it immediately showed up on the MFD. Works beautifully. The other super cool feature is it has bluetooth, so you can mirror the display to any device (phone or tablet). The benefit of this is you don't have to purchase a second MFD if you have 2 helms. I just use my iPad to mirror the radar, chartplotter, etc. I know everyone has different experiences but I couldn't be happier with this system.

Taras said:

I just replaced my Radar and MFD on my boat. I went with the Simrad bundle which came with the HALO 20 radar, 9" MFD (which is plenty big enough) complete chartography as well as a new transducer for fish finding and depth. The entire system was only $1999 through The GPS Store and it was incredibly easy to install and set up. Everything works perfect and I really love the Radar, its super. I then purchased the Simrad AP44 autopilot and just plugged it into the NMEA 2000 backbone and it immediately showed up on the MFD. Works beautifully. The other super cool feature is it has bluetooth, so you can mirror the display to any device (phone or tablet). The benefit of this is you don't have to purchase a second MFD if you have 2 helms. I just use my iPad to mirror the radar, chartplotter, etc. I know everyone has different experiences but I couldn't be happier with this system.

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Similar experience for me. All went well until I purchased the Simrad AIS. Then all hell broke loose. I lost track of the hours I spent on hold but way over a dozen and the issue never did get resolved. I returned the unit to Simrad and they lost it ....twice. I finally gave up and purchased an Emtrak and just ate the cost of the Simrad. Cost in brain cells was too high.

Other than the positively awful tech support, it's a fine system. Works great when it works.

Peter

I put the latest Axiom+ displays on my last boat circa 2020 and while I liked the interface and features, they crashed from time to time and the screen refresh when panning and zooming the map was laggy and slow even with the latest, greatest processors. I installed Furuno TZT3 displays on my current boat early this year, and the reliability and speed is just miles ahead of the Raymarines.

There is a reason for this. TimeZero is descended from the old Nobeltec PC navigation package. It was written by a pair of alpha geek operating system and video game programmers, one of whom is a good friend of mine, who left Microsoft to found the company around 1990 or so. They were absolute wizards at getting maximum video performance out of very limited hardware, and the rendering engine architecture they built back then underlies the superior performance of TimeZero to this day. Hardware manufacturers like Raymarine are not able to attract elite software talent like that. Furuno is smart to license TimeZero technology rather than roll their own.

We had a 2008 older system on the Helmsman we bought 3 years ago. Furuno radar stopped working the first month and all was an old system. Could not find anyone to work on it in Anacortes Wa. Chart plotter was old as well, basically a picture of charts ("navnet"), some of which had little detail, and the depth sounder was not working well either. Our yard only does Garmin, so had a total refit of electronics, with a small display up on the fly bridge, with all data up there that is at the main helm. In September finished our first summer with new system. garmin 8616XSV, radar GMR 18 HD with 18" radome. added a thru water hull speed in addition to depth and wind speed. Paid way too much but it is what it is. Worked pretty well. can do side by side or overlay with various features. really like the radar overlay on chart and can turn it off easily when not in use.