I am looking at buying the Garmin GXM52 XM antenna to receive Sirius XM weather, NEXRAD, sea conditions, and Sea Surface Temperature (SST)on a Garmin 4212. My question about SST, is the resolution of the SST from Sirius good enough to be as useful as the data from the subscription services to find interesting places to start fishing? What companies are providing fishing trip planning data for the recreational fisherman? Is it expensive? Any recommendations or comments… Sirius, subscription or free on-line data?
NO. I use it for the music and the satellite Radar. The SST info is rarely very good from what I’ve seen. Also for sea conditions it will tell you what the buoy is reading but it also tries to guess sea states everywhere else and is always way off.
From what I have read, Simrad’s SST is much more functional than
Garmins. That being said, I got the offshore subscription to try for a couple months. Will switch back to the lesser plan if I don’t find it to be useful.
I have it on my simrads and fished last Saturday and it was spot on . I was fishing sc wahoo shootout hammerdown
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Simrad’s WM-3 is far better than the WM-2 I have had on Lowrance and Simrad products in the past. Resolution seems to be better, and accuracy is improved.
The storm tracking in the summer is worth the $. Having to figure out what cells are doing with your own radar just creates a giant distraction while fishing, IMO. With the satellite tracking, you have some pretty good certainty with what you can and can’t get done around the weather.
Answering my own original post. I’m hoping someone at Garmin or someone who has influence with them reads this.
I have a Garmin 4212 chartplotter and GXM52 receiver (latest software installed 7.70 and 2.20) with Sirius marine coastal subscription. On the Garmin 4xxx thru the 7xxx series chartplotter, the SST data is graphed on in a default scale of 32 to 90 deg and there is no installed feature to allow rescaling of the temperature data. With such a wide temperature scale, identification of local temperature gradients is really not possible. The 8xxx series is the only large screen Garmin chartplotters that have software support for rescaling SST data. Myself and others have asked Garmin to provide a software update for the 4xxx thru 7xxx chartploters, but until they do I find the SST data to be pretty useless. Maybe if enough people raise the problem with Garmin they will release an update!
PS While they are at it, Garmin should provide software support for rescaling sea conditions data. The default scale of 0 to like 40 ft? is not nearly as helpful as it could be.
