We just went through this. Spent several hours yesterday at the
Vancouver boat show with reps from
Garmin,
Raymarine, and B&G.
I went in thinking I would switch to B&G with a Zeus 9"
screen and 4G
radar.
I stayed with Raymarine and bought an ES97 with the Quantum chirp
radar.
The reason was that the new LighthouseII
software has some excellent upgrades for sailors that make it pretty similar to B&G. (Video below gives a good explanation.)
I have older ST60
instruments and an Raymarine ST7000
autopilot. I only need one cable to get all of my old stuff to seamlessly send data to the new plotter.
The one thing that Raymarine does that B&G wouldn't do is auto-routing. I use that feature on my
iPad Navionics app, and frankly don't wish to lose that feature.
The one thing B&G has that isn't yet available on Raymarine is forward scan sonar. I ordered a
Navionics Platinum chart for my waters which is really detailed, and I've been told that RM will be having a forward sonar through
hull out in the future that will
work with all their present
hardware.
We are trying out the
WIFI only Quantum Chirp radar as the
price was excellent at the
boat show, and we can always retro add the data cable if unsatisfied later.
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