I am off to the boat show tomorrow and I am in the market for some electronics for my mottle33 at present all it has is an I 40 bidata.
With the amount of boat dollars I have poured into her my budget will be limited to a max of 8 boat dollars. I am looking at costal cruising and maybe a lord how in a year or two.
What would the advice be on what to get first and brand

Hi Ramona
I already have a hand held gps i have the laptop so will look at downloading one of those programs.
Maybe i should have been a little more precise i am looking at an auto pilot and chart plotter that can be hooked up to each other. I only have a hand held vhf so will want one thinking of one being able to hook up ais but don't know much about it. Also if funds go that far i would like an anchor winch and wind instruments that will also he able to hook up to auto pilot.

Hi,

I use a Raymarine Evolution autopilot, with their electro/mechanical actuator, interfaced with a small A series plotter. The plotter is to small, but I am happy with the autopilot.

Total cost was well under your budget. I did the install myself and costs included some extras to replace and rewire switch panels to give the required 15 amp circuit. There were other costs to interface the plotter with my older series wind instruments. Interfacing with the wind instruments is well worthwhile as it allows you to set the autopilot to hold course relative to the wind.

If you are thinking about going for the i40 wind, have a look at the reviews first. Not a lot of good things said about the Rotavecta transducer.

for AIS, have a look at the Vespermarine Xb-8000. It has wifi so you can also send AIS and NMEA data to your iPad. I run inav-x on the iPad and it will display AIS traffic on the chart. There are also some free apps to display NMEA data. I also have a couple of apps on my android phone which will display NMEA data, quite handy to be anywhere on the boat and have a range of instruments in your pocket.

some of the newer plotters have wifi as well, definitely worth considering to get the data onto mobile devices.

check out this site for good reviews etc

www.panbo.com/

Hi Two Dogs,

If you ask HG nicely he will turn your photo the right way around for you

They were offering some good discounts