On Jun 23, 9:38?am, HK wrote:
Bit frustrating trying to find the "right" GPS Chartplotter for a new boat.

We've been looking for a larger screen plotter, 6 or 7" diagonal, with
the possibility of adding on a sonar/fishfinder, between $600 and $1000.

Almost everything we have looked at has too many damned features. We're
pretty sure we don't want to hook up a video camera or DVD player to it!

Anyway, I kind of like the combo units from Lowrance and Standard
Horizon. Lowrance has a unit with a built in 30-gig hard drive and two
drawers for chips. I wonder about the efficacy of a hard drive on the
center console of a small boat out there in the ocean.

I don't much like the new Garmin units.

In case we go for separates, any recommendations for a color screen
fishfinder? It doesn't have to have a screen nearly as large as the plotter.

With the basic guts of the electronics almost identically configured
from one unit to the next and workmanship pretty well standardized at
a
decent level thoughout the industry, the only thing the mfgrs have to
"sell" is the number of features available on brand X over brand Y.

Additional features (once designed) cost almost nothing to add to a
basic device. As a result, everything from TV remotes, cell phones,
marine electronics, etc, is now overly complex.

Forty years ago we all owned TV sets or radios that had two- three
basic controls and three basic functions. We could switch them off and
on. We could turn the volume up and down. We could switch to a
different station. It now takes four dozen buttons on a high tech
remote control to, essentially, turn the darn thing on, turn it off,
adjust the volume, or change the program shown on the screen. What the
heck sort of "progress" is that? :-)