Emails about customer service are usually complaints, but not this one:
I was an early adopter of the Simrad broad band radar. My first one was a 1st edition BR24. That worked great but the dome failed after going out of warranty. The Simrad technical staff (very helpful on the phone) arranged for it to be replaced by a 4G dome at a very good price but no warranty. That unit worked even better than the BR24 had. Unfortunately the 4G dome failed recently. This time Simrad sent out a tech in short order and replaced the dome despite the unit having no warranty. The rest of my whole boat Simrad system has performed flawlessly so I think these failures were just bad luck.
This was handled by Sean Hatherly (Navico National Sales Manager I believe), Brian Gifford (Navico National Warranty Manager) and a very able tech whose name I do not know unfortunately. I think this is great backing. I was very pleased. I can barely imagine changing away from Simrad for boat electronics.
Great blog. Thanks for the excellent work.
Russ Barron
Good to know that an internationally known marine electronics blogger can get excellent customer service. It demonstrates capability. My experience with Navico tech support has been generally positive, with the few difficulties in the cross brand questions, apparently most "sailors" don't care about imaging Sonar, nor DSC poll tracking of their tenders, and Navico does not generally test if B&G works with Simrad or Lowrance. They will admit that they support NMEA 0183 and 2000 sort of, though proprietary network terms and connectors seem to creep in a lot.
I suspect that "Lioness" is going to be a bit of a test bed for a few things, and fortunately we have the extraordinary resource of Eric Steinberg as our Level 3 dealer.
Today's emails to B&G support were on: Sonichub2 interfaceing to VHF radio for muting, marine speakers to insert into old Analogue display holes and a feature request; that the Sonar and radar imaging/overlay be corrected with the H5000 3D motion sensor to take out the pitch, roll, trim & heel errors as well as correcting for wave height so that bottom display/recording is accurate independent of boat motion.
The good support by B&G does not apply to the UK. I have sent numerous emails to B&G UK and never received one reply. Even their support at UK boat shows is dismal. Very keen to sell you their latest product after that you are on your own.