What to choose: Stand-alone Radar (Furuno 1623) or Integrated...

[12 sail away]

Dear CF,

Since I am sailing more often out on the (North)sea I am seriously considering investing in a radar. When trying to get advice from nautical stores and shops I hardly get any other advice then: Replace everything with a Raymarine E7, radardome etc.etc. resulting in many Euro's and say goodbuy to all the -old- but fine working equipment... So I am not into this. I have an full-functioning- Raytheon RC520 plotter that I use as back up since I sail predominatly with Navionics and Inavx (2 Ipad's in case of..). Scanning the internet I see that the 'good old Furuno 1623', who I see a lot on sailing vessels, is still widely available and especially in the US for an interesting price (around 1300 $). So if I would go for a stand-alone Furuno I would miss the integration with a modern plotter etc., but saving a lot of money but certainly have no single point of failure with a standalone plotter/ipad and radar.

So my question: any experiences with the Furuno as Stand-alone/any advice from a sailing community instead of Raymarine sellers who are behind budget...

Thanks for any reply/advice,
Noel

SY-Beato
The netherlands

[rebel heart]

I have a standalone and was considering getting one of the fancy new integrated jobs.

When I did my research I got to the conclusions:

- The new radars are better, but not materially so in that it will make a real difference in safety or operation (compared to my existing Furuno standalone).
- I had better places to spend my money.
- It would cost a lot of money.
- The marine electronics game, specifically around integrated systems, is getting a little consumer-desire-to-have-shiny-things driven and not vessel-necessary.

I still use paper (no chart plotter) and my AIS display is what the GX2150 VHF shows me. My transponder is a blackbox. So my power profile is quite low which helps on a lot of the overnight passages and overall reduces engine hours, noise, and diesel cost.

Just my opinion of course; lots of boats set up in different ways with happy people onboard.

[mbevins]

I personally don't like my radar sharing the same monitor as my plotter. There are a couple of reasons. First I find it distracting and sometimes difficult to read when it is laid on top of the chart. It's to easy to miss a dot in a busy chart.
Secondly and most importantly from a redundancy perspective it makes no sense to put 2 critical devices on the same device. If the plotter fails for some reason then now your radars dead as well. The other thing to consider is that your radar will last 15 years minimum. The plotter you'll replace much sooner and I can guarantee that the radar will not be forward compatible with the new plotter.
In the end I think the the marketing is brilliant, for the manufacturer and the reseller.

Regards
Mark

[rw58ph]

Originally Posted by mbevins

I personally don't like my radar sharing the same monitor as my plotter. There are a couple of reasons. First I find it distracting and sometimes difficult to read when it is laid on top of the chart. It's to easy to miss a dot in a busy chart.
Secondly and most importantly from a redundancy perspective it makes no sense to put 2 critical devices on the same device. If the plotter fails for some reason then now your radars dead as well. The other thing to consider is that your radar will last 15 years minimum. The plotter you'll replace much sooner and I can guarantee that the radar will not be forward compatible with the new plotter.
In the end I think the the marketing is brilliant, for the manufacturer and the reseller.

Regards
Mark

Separate for the same reason above.

[Cheechako]

nothing wrong with stand alone radar.