 Re: Garmin vs Furuno radar
From what I've seen, the existing V2 radar is still potentially better than the Garmin HD radar. In the hands of an expert, the Furuno will give better information. In the hands of a novice, that may not be the case. I'm not an expert, but more than a novice. My opinion of the radars available last year (not counting the new HD radars from RM or Furuno, or Even Northstar), is that the RM and Garmin were quite good in most conditions. I had an RM and Furuno dome on my boat last year and compared them.
The RM (which was similar to the Garmin in use on my buddy's boat), was nice on sunny days, or even around dusk. Coming home one day in really heavy rain, both my RM and his Garmin were almost useless. I turned my Furuno VX2 radar on, and was able to tune it to get some usable information (I couldn't see even the markers and the charts in the area are off enough to cause a problem).
On auto settings, but the RM and the Garmin outperformed my Furuno. After playing with the radar a bit, reading a couple introduction to radar books, and most importantly calling Furuno tech support, the Furuno really outshone the rest.
Furuno's new UHD radar seems to blow away their old stuff. I'm told that the auto programs on it are so good that even experts cannot get a better picture by manually adjusting things (although those options are still there if you need or want them). The radar (if I read this correctly) is still true colour, but is now 256 colours!
Images I've seen from RM's new HD radar are also impressive, so I guess you could make an argument for them as comparable (I don't know if anyone has actually tried both in real world conditions to prove which is better). I'll go on the reputation that Furuno has for building the best radar and bet that they don't intend to lose that title. I also look at the prices of the RM HD vs the Furuno UHD. I can buy 2 12kw Furuno arrays and have money left over from what I've seen the RM prices at (please correct me if I'm wrong).
I believe the Ethernet wiring to be a much better idea than the traditional power/signal/video wire cluster that we've used in the past. They're hard to run, prone to damage if you're not careful, and expensive.
By offloading the image processing to a dedicated processor in the radar, it frees up your display unit for other things. With the MFD's that means it can use it's own internal processing power for chart display, etc. with little impact from radar. You're not really giving up much in fault tolerance because if you lose the array, it doesn't matter where the processing is being done.
My final deciding factor, and a big one, is after sales support. RM's support quality is constantly reported on this site, so I won't waste more time on that. Garmin's support is quite good. Furuno's support is better. The Garmin people I spoke with were always very friendly and eager to help, but they didn't always have the technical expertise to answer my questions if they were too detailed. The Furuno people really know their stuff. No matter what you ask, they have the answer, or pass you to somebody else right there on the spot with the answer.
My first experience with their support was trying to get a 15 yr old radar working. The guy had me test current on each wire in the cable to find the bad one, and helped explain how to bypass and get it working.
When I put the NN2 radar on my new boat last year, their support had me out on the water tuning it. Their over the phone tuning made it work great!
From price, reliability, and support, Furuno wins in my book. The older products were not as easy to use as the Garmin. The NN3 looks to be quite intuitive.
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