Garmin GMR 24 HD Marine Radar Reviews | Marine Electronics

This GMR24HD was an AWESOME addition to my boat's Garmin GPSMAP 5208 system. I do a lot of dusk/night boating and this has truly opened-up my nighttime-eyes. No-muss, no-fuss, it just plain works at the touch of a button on my display. I run with radar-overlay now (radar-returns shaded over the chartplotter's GPS-display) in almost all conditions. It cuts through almost all weather, though did occlude on one occasion where it was raining so hard I couldn't see the bow. One of the best features (other than the obvious collision-avoidance) of using RADAR is seeing boats coming up off my stern, something that is difficult to keep an eye on visually while underway... now the radar overlay lets me know when someone is coming up on me. This even picked-up kayakers in a channel I was navigating (I assume their paddles). People talk about how much better a 4-foot open-array might be over this 2-foot closed-array, but I've got to say the compact and clean/protected setup of this GMR24HD performs better than I could need! The only thing I've noticed to-date that this won't detect are the little crab-pot buoys/markers in the Chesapeake Bay... maybe someday crabbers will be forced to use metal indicators instead of plastic.