[Vasco]

Maduro,

Where are you intending to cruise? One factor is the quality of the electronic charts. If you intend to cruise the Bahamas I would definitely get the Garmin. Their chart chips of the Bahamas are much more accurate than the Navionics chips (Raymarine) which is full of geo-referencing errors. If I had it to do over I would definitely not get the Raymarine. Last year cruisers in the Bahamas sent Raymarine a petition concerning the lack of accuracy in the Navionics Bahamas charts. I don't think it will change Navionics' thinking as I pointed out quite a few specific errors to them four years ago and all they said was they had a new chip but would not answer my specific questions as to what had been changed. It turned out that the new chip was worse than my old one (I had a chance to compare it with mine as another cruiser had the "new" chip.) Apparently the "old" chip which I had contained bits of Explorer chart data which Navionics was not licensed to use and had to remove from the "new" chips. For some reason Navionics refuses to license Explorer charts whereas Garmin and C-Map do. As for the hardware I have heard nothing but good about the Garmin. The Raymarine works well too. If only good charts went with it. I have the C80 and 2kw radar. I think the ST 60's are NMEA compliant.