Yes and no. I am as pi$$ as the sailor next berth when it comes to inflated prices for these "toys", but in all fairness, a marine GPS is a little more complex than a TomTom, whose business is to simply follow certain traced lines (the highways). Plus, it may also have a depthfinder with its own business to attend to. A lot of stuff to interface that your run-of-the-mill GPS doesn't have.sailboat mike wrote:
The manufacturers of this stuff make me laugh, when you can buy a GPS (chart plotter) for your car for less than $100, yet marine chart plotters start at $400, you can buy wireless home weather stations with all the info including wind speed and direction for less than $100 yet just the wind instrument on a marine instrument is $1200 or more.
Yet, the prices are certainly a little inflated.
Sailors require precision when it comes to wind instruments, too. Of course, you may use a hand-held wind gauge--or tell tale threads that cost nothing. But you're right, when it comes to reliability of an instrument that cost you thousands of dollars, one would expect much more.
These devices are supposed to "break down" sooner rather than later, so that poor suckers like ourselves may upgrade
