Nice to hear from you Malroy.
Yep, you are spot on...rip off Britain.
Mark B has the 182C fitted to his new 640 Quicksilver, and I have to say the unit is fantastic.
The first thing to hit you is the quality of the colour display. It is real crisp and so easy to see in the daylight, even when looking into the cabin from the outside deck!! Much, much better than the mono displays.
The speed of the mapping redraw rate was impressive too, a lot quicker than some I've seen on much more expensive units. You could argue that it would be nice to have a bigger display but we didn't notice this as a problem, especially when the refresh rate is so quick.
The detail in the mapping is extremely good, although one thing we have noticed is that if you highlight a wreck you can bring up a box that gives you details of the feature, but it doesn't include the name of the wreck, which would have been nice. Not sure if you can add the name yourself.
We used to plotter for find a couple of wrecks that were on the chart and we found them straight away, so the accuracy of the gps is very good. And it's WAAS and EGNOS compatible so you will get the increased accuracy when that system comes on line.
Installation was pretty simple. The unit automatically finds itself when turned on for the first time, so no set up problems. We also wired the plotter to his new Garmin Colour FF (another great unit) which was pretty simple to set up and worked straight away, once a setting in the menu was changed to transmit a signal to the FF.
All in all, a very impressive piece of kit for the money (when bought offshore). I was not convinced about the need for a colour plotter, but having seen the quality and clarity of the sunlight viewable displays I am now convinced. Plotters are much easier to use than a standard GPS, too. Mark would openly admit that he is not a techie, but he has taken to it like a duck to water.
Paul D purchased a mono plotter from the States, and even with all the added costs of tax, duty and shipping to still saved over