A friend recently bought a new 17" Arima and asked me for suggestions for chart plotter, fish finder, gps, depth sounder. Since I haven't kept up on the current products available, I'm not much help.
The boat would be used primarily for fishing in the sound and probably a trip to Canadian waters with time pulling waterskiers also.
I'd like to hear what you learned folks think would work best for my friend.

In order of preference:

Furuno
Raymarine
Lowrance

Just my .02 worth (in other words, worthless)

PS. Don't forget the VHF----ICOM is the only way to go

Furuno

Thanks Bucket & JLH....

Bucket - up north?

why did you post this over here? It's fishing related...

I second the furuno and have had no luck with lowrance. Bitter as mine just took a crap.

ive had good luck with the garmin color gps/ff combo units...no advice on radar. like most things it depends on price, u usually get what you pay for. cheers

10-4, see ya in a couple of weeks.

Garmin or Lowrance, depending on what's on sale. Just make sure you get color and illuminated.

I have had Lowrance products for the last 15 years on my boats and never a problem. Currently I have the 113HD. Whatever you get, tell your friend to buy as much Power, screen, and pixel count that he can afford. Don't buy less then 2400 watts of peak to peak power or if measured in RMS 300 for salt water fishing (the rough conversion from peak to peak to RMS is to divide the peak to peak number by 8 or for the other way times the RMS number). Good luck.

If he can afford it, Furuno, if $$$ is an issue, Garmin.

Garmin for gps, Furuno has made a good product for a long time. I always used a fish finder as the depth sounder, water temp, speed, etc. It may sound sort of dumb, but the last power boat that I owned had a GPS with an RS-232 (serial) interface, I bought the Navtech software and loaded it into the laptop and used the laptop for the chart plotter. It worked well for my needs and I hear the newer software has 3-D contouring of the ocean floor.

I learned RMS a little differently. Peak to Peak is 360 degrees of a sine wave if you were to o-scope the device. RMS stands for root means squared and is 180 degrees of peak to peak averaged over a square wave (rather than sine). The reason for this is that generally distortion begins to occur at or around RMS. The calc for figuring RMS to PtoP is to multiply (RMS) x 1.414 then multuply by 2 (for 360 degrees). To go from PtoP to RMS multiply (PtoP) x 0.707, then divide by 2 (180).

Also important is to ensure that you don't draw more power than what the alternator can put out or you will just drain off of your batteries. You should be able to get the amp output for the alternator. You probably won't draw too much with the above, but it's nice to make sure. Use Ohm's to figure out your load. (watts) / (voltage) = (amps)

OK I think we were talkin about a 17' boat here!

Thanks again for all the helpful info. I've forwared your suggestions on.

Bucket - I'll save you some oatmeal.