"Larry" wrote in message
...
"rlojmo" wrote in news:1172516760.374755.127670
@a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com:

Could anyone comment on their experience with the raymarine RL80CRC?

One other comment, if you get the crazy idea to add the "Smart Heading
Sensor" in hopes of getting rate of turn information out of it for you
autopilot, DON'T. It's useless, a waste of $900. It's NOT a gyroscope.

I've got the RL80CRC at the helm, and the RL70CRC at the navstation. They
have worked well for me for several years, but last summer the RL70 started
to spontaneously reset, apparently caused by the high temperatures in
Hawaii. It had previously been to Hawaii and back, under similar
conditions, with no problem. I expect even good stuff to occasionally
break, so this isn't necessarily all that terrible, but this series is no
longer in production. Raymarine says thay can repair it, but since it works
OK in the cooler northern California climate I will probably leave it alone
until I replace the whole setup with something newer. Of course, I will
have to replace my Raymarine radar in order to interface it to the newest
Raymarine E-series chartplotters. For what it's worth, my Raymarine 4KW
radar has been a solid performer for the last five years.

Here's what I like about the RL70/80CRC:
- Works fine as a chartplotter
- Flexible radar display: separate window, split-screen, or chart overlay
- Radar MARPA is nice to have, and actually works pretty well
- The display works well in daylight, and dims well for night use.

Issues:
- Obsolete, no feature enhancements in the future (will never support AIS)
- Uses CMAP chart chips, which are good, but the new Raymarine gear uses
Navionics charts instead
- Sharing waypoints between the networked units, or an attached PC, is
difficult (for me) to make work well
- Doesn't recognize the NMEA output from my B&G wind instruments (it expects
a different NMEA wind message). My other NMEA inputs are recognized.

By the way, the Smart Heading Sensor significantly improves the performance
of of the MARPA function, and some radar display modes. Without it the
radar loses target-lock if the boat is yawing around. I haven't tried to
feed my autopilot with the Smart Heading Sensor, but the outputs (Heading
and Rate Of Turn) are supposed to help the performance of the more advanced
autopilots. I don't think that anyone really uses a true gyro for this
application (on a sailboat, anyway).

My advice is to make sure that the RL80CRC does what you want. You won't be
able to upgrade, and support will probably become an issue. A newer unit
will be a better long-term solution, but you should be able to get the
RL80CRC at a significant discount. Regardless, planned (or unplanned)
obsolescence seems to be the way of the world, so I don't expect even the
newest units to be a permanent solution -- there will eventually be a new
feature that I really want to have. A PC-based system has some big
advantages in this regard, but the disadvantages are still too great for me
to jump on that bandwagon just yet.

-Paul