My radios are original to the boat, old Raymarine 55 VHF and a Icom M801e HF. Both have DSC and are programed with the mmsi and connected to gps so the DSC distress function is set up on both.

Both use nmea 0813 so I had to buy a converter when I updated my chart plotters because they are nmea2000

Question for you JohnE, are you opting for AIS receive only, or transmit and receive?

For RX only, there is no doubt that ICom are quality (see the M605Euro as a benchmark), and I'm not normally a fan boy for B@G, bit I do like the B@G V60 as a lower cost alternate VHF c/w AIS Receiver.

It does a lot of things right. I had a Navicom setup with a wireless remote handset that i found very useful, and the V60's wireless handset (H60) made my Navicom look like a toy, the H60 was a serious bit of kit.

Both units will comfortably get you to the horizon. The Icom shines in really highly saturated RF environments, so it comes down to how much money you want to throw at it.
Cheers!

JonE said..
Thanks lads.

Interesting you raise the B&G. I was racing on a boat with B&G with built in ais (tx and rx) last weekend. It appeared to be somewhat unreliable - my pet theory being that when there were too many unacknowledged targets the AIS shat the bed until the unit was power-cycled.

I wonder if the right thing to do is to have one more go at getting GPS into my iCom and get one of those $500 standalone ais units.

I've a preference for the vhf radio to stick to just rx and a separate Class B transponder for rx and tx.
You just need an active splitter (no big deal) as now you have two transmitters, vhf on the radio and ais on the transponder.
Having dual AIS receivers is really handy, especially for troubleshooting. Both Receivers' had RS232 to the PC (as well as the NMEA port) for Adrena, so I could swap between them if I needed to.
There was a little app on the PC called ProAIS2 that was cool, indsutry standard app that gave you all the usual stuff (diagnostics, signal levels, MMSI etc) but you could also read the NMEA strings going out on the nmea port.
Below is a simple line digram of my old setup, The only thing I'd change from this is upgrading the Class B transponder from the older CSTDMA to SOTDMA.
SOTDMA uses scheduled time slots or windows for transmission, a much better solution than the old 'wait for a free slot' used by my CSTDMA unit.