Originally Posted by spareparts
if you get a chance to operate a gps unit like you want in a boat before you buy it, its worth the effort. I just wasted a ton of time with one of my customers that just bought a new 27 ft cabin boat last July. The boat came with a Ray Marine( usually good stuff, we sell alot of the big stuff) RC435 GPS. He bought the navionics gold card for it, loaded with info. Everything was fine untill he started usuaing the boat, he kept calling me telling me the unit was malfunctioning. The first unit was going blank while it was sitting still and was not giving acurate heading information, no problem, got a new one from the boat manufacture, second one acted up differntly, but still screwed up(bad batch I assume, that happens with all manufactures) I call Raymarine, get a new one(different batch) works great, but the customer keeps complaing about the screen blinking. I check it out, works fine with me at the dock, carry the boat out, sure enough, it starts to blink. What its doing is rewritting the info on the screen based on your position. I could change the headiong as little as 10 degrees and it would rewrite(takes about 10 seconds to do). I changed the scren setup to coarse view rather than heading, now the boat moves on the screen rather than the screen moving around the boat. Does OK, now it will only rewrite when turning more than 30 degrees, or when your run off the screen. I normally operate on North up, to me its easier( its like reading a chart, i still use them also), especially when off shore with no land mass or object to use as a reference. With north up, it does ok, especially if you zoom out a bit, but the customer, like most boaters, wanted heading up. Long story getting longer here. I replaced the Raymarine unit with a Garmin unit of the same size, it runs twice as fast as the Ray unit did, has a seamless screen while running course up or heading up(doesn't rewrite, just keeps going), smaller display, but overall, nicer unit. Point I'm trying to make is, let someone else be the tester, find someone who has a unit simular to what you want, try it out on a boat if posible, you never know what little things that will irritate you about a unit till you try it. And playing with the unit while its sitting in the display at Boaters World will not neccessarily tell you the whole story
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