What are the preferred setups in marine electronics these days?

[Creedence]

My last experience with marine electronics was 6 years ago, the last two of which have been spent almost entirely removed from the boating community so I’m a bit out of touch with the latest stuff. My last boat had the full suite of chartplotters, autopilot, radar, engine monitoring, etc- all on a Raymarine backbone. That made my upgrade choices easy as it was just a matter of replacing the hole in at the helm with a newer version of whatever Raymarine piece of equipment was just removed.

I’m back in business again, but this time I have a pretty blank canvas to work with, and I was going to get an idea of what people are doing these days for cruising setups. I’m mostly intermediate coastal cruising (ie, a couple days offshore to get to the keys, or some Bahamas should things open up), with plans for the Caribbean in the next few years.

Is the preference these days still the purpose-built, proprietary suites (Garmin,, Raymarine, etc), or is openCPN the better option? If some prefer openCPN, what are the best peripherals (radar, GPS antenna, AIS, etc) to use? I’ve tried searching, and am simply overwhelmed with the amount of nuanced information out there. I’m hoping this thread could serve more as a top-level comparison of some complete setups.

Appreciate any thoughts.

[rslifkin]

OpenCPN vs a proprietary setup (or a combo of both) is really down to preference. The big question is, what functions, features, etc. do you want/need and what are your priorities?

[Creedence]

I thought it was open-architecture in that you could interface peripheral hardware from any manufacturer. If that’s not the case, that just highlights how unfamiliar I am.

I’d like to have a chartplotter with radar and AIS overlays (as well as AIS-out) with displays both at the helm and down below, and control of an autopilot... and I guess that’s about it. Nothing insanely sophisticated. Are the “big-brand” packages still the way to go for a pedestrian application like mine?

[d8v1dl]

I'm a big fan of redundancy and no single point of failure. I am re-commissioning a boat that sat on the hard for several years during which time the Raymarine C80 display expired after a decade or so of sun and rain. This resulted in no radar, no electronic charts. Just the standalone speed/depth. This in turn means that my perfectly good Raymarine radome is now useless and I have to replace both units.

My first step was to go with standalone Vesper Watchmate. To me that was the top safety issue. I can fall back to paper charts to figure out where I am easily enough, but paper charts don't tell you about that tug and tow about to cross your bow at 3 AM.

I will shortly be replacing the chartplotter with a player-to-be-named, but I like the reduction in anxiety I felt from having reliable AIS information from an indepedent, integral unit that isn't vulneralbe to a failure in a peripheral component that is uninvolved in the actual AIS (like an ethernet connection or flaky power supply) rendering me blind at said 3 AM (which, as we know is when it always happens). So the Watchmate will stay isolated. It comes with a full-function app so that you can repeat onto an Android or Apple device.

To me there is no need to make things any more complicated than that.