Well I bought an 8 inch ONWA GPS, About $600-00 AUD delivered, Built in K Maps, and a
remote Antenna and 10 metre cable,
Had it mounted temporarily in the
boat along with my 5 inch Garmin GPS,
It has identical maps to the Garmin, They both use the same Govt Hydrographic maps,
It takes 30 seconds to start up, Instant Auto locater of the
boat,
It has a seperate Chart Slot that can be loaded with
OpenCPN or
Navionics, Etc, Downloaded into a Micro card into my
laptop and the put into the Onwa GPS slot,
No driving round in circles like the Garmin needs,
I dont need glasses to read it, Like I do with the garmin,
Its very clear and clean and easy to read,
Speed, Direction,
Depth, Chart, Identical to the Garmin,
I had the
remote ONWA
antenna beside the Garmin Antenna and no
interference on either GPS's,
The ONWA has both cursor and boat position and speed on the front page,
I dont have to change pages to get the boats Position like the Garmin does,
I Came into the Yaringa Marina after dark which has no channel lights working, No problems,
23 channel lights are missing, or not working,
I followed both the channels in with the Onwa and Garmin GPS and didnt hit anything or run aground,
Im Very pleased with the Onwa GPS, 1/4 the cost of a new Garmin,
It was working for about 6 hours and I had no problems with it,
It didnt even flicker once,
I ran aground 6 month ago and had to spend the night on the boat in Westernport bay as my Garmin GPS wasnt working at the time,
I could see the Marina, But couldnt find the channel in, at night, Low tide,
At low tide the channel is four feet deep. Everything else is above
water,
I did report it to the Marina at the time, But nothing has been done to the channel lights yet,
Luckily I have LED spotlight bars on my top spreader, So I can see the unlit channel markers in the dark.
One of which I almost run over with my boat as I couldnt see it in the dark,
My spreader lights have paid for themselves, By avoiding hitting the channel marker pole with my boat, and the resulting damage to my boat,
I have made a new bracket for the Onwa to sit on, It swivels around so I can sit in the
salon in comfort and see it,
I just have to stand up and look around every ten minutes or so to see if any boats are approaching, Or any thing else that might be out there,
Rocks,
Reefs, low ground, are all shown very clearly on the Onwa GPS screen,
Cheers, Brian.