Electronics: 10 must-haves

Jon Neeves looks at the latest crop of marine electronics with a view to sorting the wheat from the chaff for the budget-conscious sailor, based on the products that caught his eye at the Sydney International Boat Show.

There was a time that if you ventured away from the confines of your local Australian home waters you would rely on a paper chart, bearings to local landmarks and maybe, if you were really flush, a trailing log. Those days are long gone, but it was not much more than 20 years ago, and visit any boat show and the must-have marine instrumentation on display even for a modest cruising yacht will cost you much more than a set of sails.

But there is a choice, particularly as no-one notices your big flash screen when you are riding the East Australian Current. We once sailed from Manila to Hong Kong using only dead-reckoning and assiduous (hourly) noting of compass bearing and boat speed; we had an upmarket trailing log. After 450nm out of sight of land we were 10nm west, which was advantageous because the then Chinese government took a pretty harsh view of illegal entry to their waters (previous yachtsmen were incarcerated for a few months, a harsh penalty for faulty navigation!). I was speaking to one world-girdling yachtsmen and he actually said he simply switched his GPS/chartplotter and other instrumentation off for much of the time as being useless consumers of power and simply switched on whatever was necessary when he filled out his log.

Minimum needs

Accepting that it’s downright silly not to take advantage of some of what the 21st century has to offer, what do you really need? It’s a personal choice but surely positional data, boat speed, direction, depth, wind speed and maybe some form of collision avoidance device would be ideal. I have never seen a yacht without a compass — so directional information should always be available, although they are not indestructible. The other must-haves, outside the scope of this article (but they get a mention) are communications and autopilot.

Screen size

I make mention of screen size, small being economic but usually perfectly adequate. By small — I’m not thinking of a phone-sized screen, I’m thinking of say five inches. The time when a large screen is a godsend is at the end of a long and trying passage (think cold and damp) and entering a complex, unknown and badly lit anchorage. When eyes and brain are tired big screens help — if this is not your ambition, save your money, maybe buy new sails instead!

But, and it is important — well charted anchorages are usually well lit — more isolated locations poorly lit and the charts might be not too dissimilar to those Cook made. The chartplotter is not always useful (can be positively misleading) and nothing beats good eye sight, caution and an accurate depthsounder.

Positional devices

Positional devices like basic GPSs are cheap, reliable and can do a bit more than simply give position. GME has their GP450X Marine GPS which is a basic black-and-white screen on which can be displayed lat and long, boat speed and direction of travel. The feature I really like is the fact the displayed digits are large and easy to read. You can also set up tracks with waypoints.

Obviously using one might require you to plot a position on a chart, but it is prudent do that anyway and even with the best electronics you should be carrying the paper chart. At $300 it really is very cost-effective, and is an ideal independent back-up to a more sophisticated system. One critical piece of data missing so far is an indication of depth, and ignoring lead lines, you need to more than double your budget to incorporate depth with positional, directional and speed data.

The cheapest we have seen with a reasonable screen is again offered by GME and has the added advantage (and it’s a huge benefit) of also being a chartplotter. GME’s G142CFD (GPS chartplotter and fishfinder) is compatible with C-Map Max charts, so you have a visual display of location as well as lat, long, boat speed, direction plus, of course, depth (and if you are so inclined an indication of where the fish are). Sadly this has increased the budget to $840 but you almost have full basic sailing instrumentation.

Another option are handheld GPSs and there are many options here (covered in the September issue of this magazine). I am not a fan. The screens are too small and I’d rather carry the paper charts, and if this was the option the iPhone with $18 Navionics charts might be a more cost-effective.

A number of other companies make similarly competitive chartplotter fishfinders; for example, Lowrance’s Elite 5 series. Most supplier also offer a simple GPS/chartplotter without the fishfinder. The screens on all of these units are small, typically five inches, but perfectly adequate — especially when you consider that a typical seven-inch GPS chartplotter will cost $1700 (or thereabouts) and a full multifunction nine-inch display $3300! Suddenly $840 looks a bargain.

Depth, wind and speed

The alternative to the fishfinder, a device to provide depth, would be a simple depth instrument and an excellent budget set of instruments has long been available from Raymarine, the ST40 range. This range also provides the cheapest option for wind data and though the racing fraternity would curl their lips the ST40 wind, $489, has stood us on Josepheline in good stead for 11 years now. We also have the ST40 depth and boat speed. The digits are large and can easily be seen at a distance. The ST40 depth costs $299 and boat speed $319 (and you could save a bit by buying their bidata, speed and depth combined, at $419). If you have no interest in the fishfinder, you can buy GME’s GPS chartplotter at $649. Some would suggest that GPS boat speed, or speed over the ground, is more than adequate — fine in Moreton Bay but if you want to have a chance at finding the best lift (or opposite) from an ocean current then speed through the water (your log) and speed over the ground (GPS) is part of the answer + water temperature (ocean currents are warmer, or colder, than the water outside the current).

The set of ST40 instruments and a GPS, or GPS chartplotter (+ the option of the fishfinder) gives you most of what you need for simple no-nonsense navigation and provides some back-up or redundancy as if either system falls over it should be well within your capabilities to plot on a chart and do a bit of dead reckoning. It depends on how extensive you want your instrumentation but for a very simple but adequate system $1000 would be ample, but you will need to plot on paper charts, and a more ambitious combination would cost less than $2000. Not as sexy as that 14-inch helm located multifunction screen unit — but sexiness costs $6000 (and does not make the owners better sailors or the yacht go faster).

Different suppliers

It merits mentioning the autopilot at this stage. Despite all the talk from the major suppliers of compatibility of instruments and their ability to share data the reality is that there is a lot of sense to buy all your instruments from one supplier. Each manufacturer seems to use plugs and cables specific to themselves but some instrumentation, radar in particular demands a screen from the same manufacturer as the scanner — and screens are expensive, so you want to minimise the number you have. Buying everything from one manufacturer allows you to do the installation yourself because they should be plug and play (and this will save you heaps on having someone install the system for you).

Contrarily buying the best units from different suppliers would possibly result in a series of standalone units (which then becomes less problematic if one unit fails in that integrated system) and because of NMEA protocols some sharing should be possible. Most of installation costs are running cables through conduits and up masts. If you are uncomfortable with idea of installation by yourself, speak to your supplier (most marine electronic companies only sell through distributors who are commonly installers) and negotiate your doing the basics and simply have them connect up. If they will not support the idea of your wanting to save money, work with a different sub-distributor — there are plenty of them and it’s a competitive market.

All units should be built to an NMEA protocol so in theory it should be possible to interface instruments from, say, three suppliers. You might need a marine electrician to knit it all together and if something does not work quite right you sadly end up with three groups denying responsibility — one supplier has advantages. (Obviously Navico, which has numerous brands under its umbrella designed to interface would be an exception.)

A final comment to consider, we know of one yacht with a decent integrated system, whose chartplotter failed (under warranty). The unit was repaired quickly and efficiently — but they could not go anywhere — because they did not know the wiring (professionally installed) and removing the chartplotter did not allow other systems to work. This was not a big issue because they were in marina, but it could be a different story in the Kimberley. Some redundancy can be valuable.

Next level up

But returning to the budget buys — we have looked at a simple GPS/chartplotter from GME/Lowrance and instrumentation from Raymarine. What happens if we move upmarket slightly and possibly extend our package to include collision avoidance and consider compatibility with our autopilot?

Looking at radar first. Some of the software for radar is in the display screen, so you need to buy your scanner and screen from the same supplier. Most suppliers have stopped manufacturing budget radar packages and really the only one we can find is from Furuno. Their M-1623 radar (six-inch black-and-white screen + 2.2kW 15-inch scanner) costs $2100 (and is cheaper than anyone else). Furuno makes a slighter bigger unit, again standalone, and it costs $3000. At this price level you can look to Lowrance’s combination of their BR24 and HDS-5M (five-inch screen), but it is also a chartplotter. All of these units will provide all the advantage you need of radar, which in addition to collision avoidance, can be used for dodging thunderstorms (although from our experience this is a bit hit and miss) and as a navigation tool because it shows up some coastal detail. Radar tends to be very power-hungry but the Furuno units have automatic sweep and sleep mode, at operator preset times say five minutes, 10 minutes etc, so power should not be a major issue.

The alternative would be Simrad/Lowrance’s broadband radar which advantageously has no warm up, compared with 70-90 seconds for conventional units, has low emissions so can be located anywhere with a clear view and this also means lower power usage, will detect targets one metre in front of your bow, compared with a dead zone on conventional units of 50m-100m but costs around $4000 (scanner plus seven- inch screen). Raymarine’s radar is similarly priced to Simrad but is conventional. If you are serious about radar, then the lower power usage and close range application of Simrad/Lowrance’s broadband makes it a very powerful unit — but it might lock you into committing to all your other instruments being also from Simrad (or Lowrance) because you will want everything plug into that one screen. Half the package cost of the Simrad and Raymarine seven-inch radar units are the screens (although these screens are multifunctional and can receive a whole host of data from a number of different transducers, the Furuno screen is radar-dedicated).

The preceding paragraph illustrates the problem of budget buys. Screens are expensive and increase in price exponentially with size (only a little bit bigger in size and you double the price). The manufacturers seem unable to overcome this and also accept that most of us will not want to buy many screens (because they are so expensive) so increasingly the screens are multifunctional (incorporating lots of software we might not need — or want to pay for). Catch 22. It is possible to buy larger GPS/chartplotters (commonly with a fishfinding ability) slightly more cheaply than a full multifunction unit, but if you then decide to add radar you are in for buying another, expensive, screen — so plan ahead. Looking at yacht mast radar is not popular — but it is really incredibly powerful when you really need it!

e7 GPS chartplotter

The current ultimate in multitasking, and surely the competition will react very quickly, is Raymarine’s e7 GPS chartplotter with a seven-inch screen. The unit contains all the software for their conventional radar, fishfinder (and all your other transducers) but will also interface wirelessly (if you buy the app) allowing all your charting data etc to be shared with your iPad or iPhone and all your music to be heard from the e7 (if that turns you on). This is a hybrid unit allowing management of the unit with either a touch screen or more conventional knobs and buttons and has a remote facility, for a bit of extra money! At the time of writing the e7 was to cost about $2300 so a good bit more than that GME’s five-inch GPS chartplotter fishfinder but offering the facility to expand its usefulness.

But for budget buys, the individual displays for depth, boat speed etc are a complete anachronism. The individual displays were developed before the big screen, multitasking unit, was even a figment in the accountant’s mind — we are being sold both, the big screen and the individual displays, but the reality is, we should only need the single screen. If you are seriously racing the priorities are different, but for the serious cruiser think outside the boat-show hype. So consider buying the e7, or something similar and the transducers, and you can display everything on the one unit, boat speed, and charts, depth and radar. If the navigation is tricky, you can discard display of wind and boat speed (and concentrate on the chart) and if you are offshore you can concentrate on boat
and wind speed.

The downside to one screen is that now we have “clutter” and you cannot see the runabout from anything else. And adding anything to the chart, radar (and the breakout boxes for boat speed etc) and it makes it difficult to sort out what is important and what is immediately critical and AIS has only made this worse. This is a particular problem if you are overlaying radar onto charts on a five-inch screen — great marketing hype but really confusing,

The latest electronic technology is possibly AIS, and even it has now been around for 5-10 years. It is really a communication tool, but included here because it is also part of collision avoidance. I have mixed views on AIS for Australia, if you are in, or near, Port Phillip or Moreton Bay there are times when it would be very useful. For the rest of Australia, if you have missed a 100,000T commercial vessel maybe you should stick to other waters for your sailing. But the big problem is small fishing boats, runabouts and other yachts, the vessels you find difficulty in seeing visually (until they are 1-3 miles away), and they do not carry AIS and possibly radar and good watch-keeping are the only answer. But for AIS there are two options: transmit only, which is a bit arrogant, or transmit and receive, which gives you the opportunity to give way to that 100,000T vessel. On the basis that you have AIS as a safety tool then a separate screen seems best because it avoids clutter, and the NZ Watchmate seems ideal. It can have its own dedicated screen and has a simple but clever personalisation programme that allows you to filter out targets you consider unimportant and costs $1300.

Other providers

An awakening for the marine instrumentation companies is the growth of other “providers”. You can now buy electronic marine charts, incredibly cheaply (less than A$20), and download to your iPhone or iPad — and a number of programmes offer AIS capability. The downsides are various, iPhones and iPads are not waterproof, depend on mobile telephony for their signals and the accuracy of positional data might be questionable, but they are cheap and the iPad has a screen as good as many more expensive, chartplotters. If you can cope with their moisture sensitivity, have adequate paper charts and maintain prudent navigational procedures then if nothing else Apple offers an interesting alternative to some segments of marine instrument hardware.