Eemeli,
Indeed a huge topic! My
advice based on 20+ years of administering computer systems as well as owning two
boats with full
electronics packages in the last five years is, to the extent possible, to try to stick with a
single vendor. If you have devices from multiple vendors, as soon as you seek support the finger pointing will begin and Vendor A will blame Vendor B's
equipment and vice versa, and the onus is then on you to prove where the problem lies. Unless you are very comfortable with troubleshooting
electronics and networks, going with multiple vendors just opens you up to a great deal of potential headache.
That said, our
current boat came with all
Furuno instruments /
chartplotter /
AIS /
radar but with a
Raymarine autopilot. The two brands worked but did not play nice together and the autopilot would occasionally drop out and go to standby and other times the chartplotter would intermittently lose communication with the autopilot. Those issues, along with other seemingly random (i.e., non-reproducible) problems that were only fixed by
power cycling the entire 0183/N2K
network, convinced me it was time to find a permanent solution. After extensive troubleshooting and getting the runaround from both
Raymarine and
Furuno, my
project the past two months has been to gut the Furuno and Raymarine
gear and strip out all the 0183
wiring and replace it with a full
B&G package (with the exception of the AIS which is a Vesper XB-8000) and implement only N2K. I had
Simrad on our previous boat and was very pleased with it so for this
refit, I stuck with what I knew would
work as the
B&G and
Simrad hardware is the same, only the
software differs.
Everything plays well together, and the few occasions I have had to call
Navico (the parent company for B&G / Simrad) for support during the install and commissioning were refreshingly straightforward with only a
single vendor to deal with.
Hope this helps and happy to answer any questions if I can...