New Garmin Oregon 400C Touchscreen Handheld GPS

Just got a shipment of Garmin Oregons in stock. As is customary with new-fangled Garmin stuff I always open one for myself.... so why not write a review?.. Several months ago Garmin came out with the Colorado series of handhld GPS's. These incorporated Garmin's sleek new look, pre-loaded charts, and a bunch of cool new features like wireless data sharing, magnetic compass, altimeter, and much more. Of course I had to have one of them. But when I caught wind of the new Oregon coming down the pipeline I couldn't sell my Colorado fast enough! The new Oregon is everything the Colorado is plus its Touchscreen! Having been a junky of other Garmin touchscreen products (Nuvi Automotive GPS, 5000 Series Boat GPS) for the last 2 years I couldn't resist. Here is what I've found so far:

Form Factor - the unit has a 3" color touchscreen. It easily fits in, and can be manipulated, with one hand. In fact I have found operation to be easiest with one hand. The screen has the same typical brightness as other Garmin handhelds. Not spectacular but hardly shabby. The screen is not affected by Polarized Glasses as many of these screens are when rotated. The unit comes with a nice Caribiner clip to attach it to a belt loop or whatever. The clip is removable. The bottom of the unit has a rubber flap to protect the USB port. Inside the unit (when the batteries are removed) there is room for a Micro SD card.

Interface - This is where Garmin does things so well - they make it easy. The touchscreen is incredibly intuitive and easy to operate. For example, the databoxes in the upper corners of the chart screen - to change what they display just click on the box and make your selection. To scroll around the Map just drag your finger across the screen. To move around the menu just swipe your finger across the screen like an iPhone. It really is awesome. With a touchscreen unit only the buttons that actually do anything at any given time are visible, so it makes knowing what to click at any given time quite intuitive.

Features - The feature set is through the roof for this thing. I honestly don't know what they are going to think of next that this unit can't already do. I'll keep this review boating related, but for the non boaters it does geocaching, topo maps, automotive routing, fitness stuff and more. Changing between modes, or "profiles" as Garmin calls it, is super easy and can be done with a couple of screen taps. Back to boating... I have put the unit through its paces for typical use on a boat - making waypoints, doing routes, finding local info like Marina locations, and navigating on a chart. It does all of this wonderfully well. Scrolling around on the screen is done by dragging across the screen with your fingertip. Zooming is done by the transparent + and - button. Every screen has a little X or back arrow on the bottom left to move to the previous page or menu. Making waypoints is simple. Just tap on the screen where you want it, then confirm it as a waypoint. Once you save the waypoint you can edit it. The edit features are extensive - you can change name, symbol, depth, comments and more. While editing text a keyboard pops up with the whole alphabet, so editing a name or comments takes seconds.

Routing is nice and easy too. You simply tap on "Routes" and either select a current route or build a new one. Building a new one requires the various waypoints to already be designated, then you pick among those waypoints to build the route. All very intuitive.

Garmin's "Where To" feature now makes an appearance on this unit. This feature has been very popular on the auto and larger marine units. Basically, after tapping the "Where To" button you can choose a route, or choose a waypoint, or choose a point of interest like a Marina. Once selected the unit will make that the active route or destination.

Compass - This unit actually has a built in compass. Don't even ask me how it works, but its pretty damn cool. You hold the unit level while in Compass mode and a magnetic compass actually appears and finds North. Awesome little piece of redundancy.

Tides - the Oregon has Tide Data built in for the whole USA, as well as Sunrise and Sunset, and Moon Phases. I could go on and on about other "cool" features as it has plenty. One I found especially cool though is the "area calculation" tool. With this tool you basically stand at the edge of a section of land you want to measure, hit the "start" button then walk the perimeter of the land. Once back to your original position you hit the "Calculate" button and it will spit out the total acres. I did it on my backyard and got .445 Acres. Pretty neat.

In my opinion this GPS has raised the bar. Garmin has done it again. I would highly recommend it to anybody looking for a handheld.

P/N 010-00697-03
Price - $599.99

Main Menu in "Fitness Mode"

Area Calculation Tool
Points of Interest Format
Huge selection of waypoint symbols - this is just one of many pages!
Chart with active route
System "Setup" MenuMy backyard :)
Main Menu in "Marine" Mode

Parker Rendezvous '08

This Saturday we were invited to the annual ClassicParker.com rendezvous. We never turn down the opportunity to attend an event like this. We had a great time and would like to Thank the organizer, Kevin, for the invite and the Classic Parker founder, Dale, for running such a great site! Its so much fun to walk from boat to boat to meet the owners and hearing over and over - I bought this from you... I bought that from you... Thank you so much to all those Parker owners that give us a shot for their electronics and outfitting needs. To cap off the day we actually caught some Rockfish (yes, I intended that to be plural!) on the way home. That's a welcome change this year! Can't wait until the ClassicParker.com rendezvous next year.

All the Parkers Lined up - with our Plate Alloy Pacific (the one with the black engine dummy!)

Doing our mandatory "walk down the runway" for photos


Beth and Jim (me) hanging on the back of a 25' Parker owned by Kevin aka Megabyte on ClassicParker.com

Mast and Mallet

Joe Reid from Mast and Mallet Boatworks dropped by today. Mast and Mallet is a custom boat builder in MD. They build some really cool downeast style boats (I hope I said that right!). His boats are all hand made one at a time. They combine the layout/features of a Maine Lobsterboat with a hull configuration more like a Chesapeake Bay "Deadrise" workboat. Joe is quite the character and a great friend of BOE. He buys all of the electronics for his boats from us, and inevitably stops by about once a week during the final fitout of each boat to ask a question or two about what hooks to what! If you have not checked out a Mast and Mallet boat at one of the local MD boat shows you are missing out.

- Jim

Fishing for a change...

Saturday night I was on the back porch grilling and got a text from my pal Chris at Intrinsic Yacht - (want to fish). We keep it simple when we text. So I cooled off the grill, threw an extra t-shirt and drawers in the car and headed down to Ocean City, MD with my brother-in-law John for a midnight arrival at Sunset Marina. Just enough time to get a buzz at Teasers but not enough time to get in too much trouble. Fast forward a few hours... "Jimmy, get up, time to go" .... huh, Oh yeah, I'm in MD sleeping on Chris's 3 day old 54 Ocean, time to go fishing.

Chris gets a new boat every year (more on that later) to fish the coastal tournaments, mostly billfish stuff but he throws her into a Tuna tournament every now and again. This weekend happened to be the Ocean City Tuna Tournament. I love Tuna fishing since "food" is my #1 priority and who doesn't like fresh Tuna?

The boat we had was a 2009 Ocean Yachts 54 SS. Chris has a great eye for detail (almost as good as me :0 ) and he gets his tournament boat really tricked out. Too cool in fact. Ocean gets a lot of ideas for future boats from the ideas Chris puts out. He will have this boat at all the major Mid-Atlantic Shows, check it out. So we were styling, and the 34 knot cruise to the fishing grounds wasn't too shabby.

I'm an electronics guy right? So I better talk about electronics at some point in this story. This boat had all the new Navnet 3D black box equipment onboard with 2 17" displays and interfaced with the LCD TV in the salon..probably the master too. I really had a good chance to give the Navnet 3D some practical evaluation. As most of us know, the jury is still out on Navnet 3D, but here is my take: Radar, Radar, Radar! The radar is absolutely awesome and worthy of buying the system even if you only plan to use it for radar. Finding birds off the coast of OC is virtually useless as there are so few of them so I couldn't test that, but I was able to test some otehr features (we had a 12kW 6' array). The first thing that hit me was the zoom, while trivial, it just looks pretty damn cool the way the screen zooms in and out without blinking or redrawing. The radar picture just pans in our out like the charts do. On most units the screen will go blank for a millisecond then the new range will be visible.

The second test I put it too was for ARPA (target tracking). Oohh la la... it worked so well! We had three boats within 3 miles of us on the way back to the inlet. I was able to consistently track all three of them, and it was VERY accurate. Neat! The tracking data was visible on the radar screen and the chart screen no matter what mode we put it in (2D or 3D, panning, zooming, twisting, turning, whatever). We could pan over in 3D mode to make it look as if we were actually on one of the boats we were tracking!

The third radar test I did was to try the new double range feature. You can run this radar on two separate ranges at the same time...but it gets better...you can actually run each range at a different gain setting. This will come in handy for fisherman that want to find birds on a 8 or so mile range with the gain cranked up, but still want to keep an eye on traffic avoidance at a range of 3/4 mile. It worked perfectly (drooling on keyboard).

The final thing we messed with was the weather overlay, specifically surface temp. The unit will allow you to overlay surface temp right on your chart. You can overlay radar data at the same time. We made the surface temp image 50% transparent so we could still see the chart below it. It worked great. One thing I di d not like was the way the colors changed for no apparent reason while zooming in and out. When on a really zoomed in range the color would be red where we were, when zooming way out it would turn green. So I am not in love with that yet as there is a piece of the puzzle missing that I haven't figured out yet.

And the charts... well... lets wait to see what kind of updates Furuno has in store before further comment. Can't wait to get some Navionics data on this machine. One thing that really surprised me is how the bathymetric data stopped once you got offshore a short distance. I did not measure the exact distance but it seemed to be 20 or 30 miles. Bathymetric data is something that offshore fisherman typically demand, so its absence offshore took me by surprise. Perhaps this will be covered in an other update. The reason I think it is missing is because we had the Raster charts set to "wrap" themselves to the bottom contour. Once we got 3 miles offshore they no longer wrapped to the bottom.

Overall, Navnet 3D gets a huge thumbs up, but there is still a lot to be improved with the charting.

Back to the fishing - we ended up with a 55" Tuna, but didn't keep it as there was still plenty of time to bag a money fish. Unfortunately that 55"er was all she wrote, so all our fishbox had in it was ice....

The next time I get offshore will probably be the White Marlin Open in August, hopefully our luck will change.

- Jim @ BOE






Here is John pulling up his pants, he had just mooned the cockpit crowd.











Chris and Jim reciting the pledge of allegiance, we do this everyday at 3:30 no matter where we are.












Shelly in amazement of how straight I can keep the boat one handed. I actually have one eye closed and am standing on one leg too, but you can't see it in this picture.










Wind, wind, wind!














So close to being tonights dinner... this one was let go...

Raymarine Certified - We are so smart....

As of last week all of out techs are Raymarine Certified. We are 100% certifiable... I mean certified to install Raymarine Electronics and qualify for onboard warranty. The Raymarine process basically tests each person for the aptitude in electronics installation techniques, product knowledge, electrical systems, grounding systems, and Raymarine protocol. You are going to have to come to our store to see our fancy plaques. They are hanging right next to all of our other fancy plaques, you can't miss 'em!

McMurdo Max-G PLB - 48 Hour Battery! New Product Introduction

BOE Marine has been chosen by Revere/McMurdo to introduce the New Max-G Personal Locator Beacon. This new PLB has a built-in GPS and a 48 Hour battery just like a full sized epirb. For a limited time we will have an introductory price of $559! Order online - offer expires 6/20/08.

Click here for details

10,000th Customer Gets Order Free!!

We would like to congratulate Tom Poole of SC for winning our impromptu give-away! It was actually not Tom's first order with us, and we have actually been through 3 different accounting programs in 6 years, but something said "10,000" so we felt compelled to celebrate. I immediately called Tom to give him the news. He shot back with "You're $hittin me". I said I was most definitely not $httin him and that his order would be free. After getting over his initial excitement, followed by the depression of not ordering that new 15" Garmin touchscreen system we talked about, he finally settled in with some genuine happiness. We were excited too. Thanks Tom for your support of BOE, we are hoping that the parts you received will not fit and you will need to return them for parts you have to actually pay for, but if you end up keeping them that's OK too!