Borrowing Mr. Well's time machine, I roar on back to the year 2003. These were heady times. The Installer put in all of the gear you see below into a new Pursuit. It included the new Raymarine HDFI sounder module which won the "Best in Show" NMEA award that year. The RL80 state of the art chart plotter and radar, and a shiny new autopilot. It has all been working very well ever since for lo all of these years, which I think is an excellent testimonial for any piece of marine gear that lives in a salt water environment. The boat is used all of the time, and the original motors were worn out. They have been recently replaced with new twin Yamaha 225hp 4 stroke engines which have a Command Link interface making NMEA 2000 data collection possible.
So as good as the gear has been, it's time for new toys, and on the list is a broadband chirping sounder system. At this point in time, there are only two available options, and the owner already has some Garmin gear, and is familiar with it. So out goes the old, and in with the new consisting of a Garmin 7215 touch screen based system with a GMR 24 radar, the new GSD 26 sounder module, and an Airmar M265LH broadband transducer. Since this is a story too big to be told at one time on the small screen, I'm going to bust it into four parts over the next week or so.