Caled West Marine Advisor this morning. He didn't know what the upgrade policy from
Garmin would be for the new
charts.
So I called
Garmin. Sat on hold for over a half an hour this morning. Finally got a tech, they do have the pricing strategy formulated now.
Most of the plotters I have been looking at come with the entire US preloaded. The
Garmin guy said you pay them $200 for an SD card with updates. After loading updates you send the card back and they credit you $120. Net cost for a complete update is $80. That I can handle!
Some of the
Garmin units include the Bahamas Explorer
charts and some apparently do not. Explorer chart card is over $200.
I am suprised at how difficult it is to find some of this info.
As I understand it,
Garmin does not support the older G
charts they installed on all their earlier
chartplotters. From what I can tell, no upgrade strategy means you can never refresh your
charts with latest data. That is a big strike against
Garmin. Will they pull that with their new Bluechart G2?