Simrad

What Is Simrad and What Does the Company Actually Make?

Simrad builds four families of hardware for boats: chartplotters and multifunction displays that show charts, radar and sonar on one touchscreen; HALO-series radar, from small enclosed domes to larger open-array antennas; AP-series autopilots that steer the boat automatically on a set course; and Active Imaging and StructureScan sonar transducers that generate the fish-finding and structure-scanning picture on screen. All four are sold as one connected system: a shared network lets an owner add a radar dome, an autopilot head and a sonar transducer to the same multifunction display over time rather than buying a closed, single-purpose unit.

The brand sits inside Navico Group, the umbrella Brunswick Corporation created for the marine electronics and accessories businesses it now owns, alongside sister brands B&G (sailing-specific instruments) and Lowrance (freshwater fishing electronics) and the C-MAP digital charting business that supplies charts to all three. Simrad's own positioning inside that family is the saltwater generalist: general cruising, sportfishing and center console boats rather than sailboat racing or bass-boat fishing, sold through the same marine electronics retailers, boatyards and installers that carry its sibling brands rather than a dedicated Simrad-only dealer chain.

Who Owns Simrad Now, and How Did It Get There?

The Simrad name dates to 1947, when Willy Christian Simonsen founded Simonsen Radio AS in Oslo with fishhook manufacturer John Mustad, building echo-sounding equipment for Norway's fishing fleet; the company took the contracted name Simrad, from Simonsen Radio, in 1957. Kongsberg Group bought the whole Simrad business in 1996 and ran both its commercial fisheries and defense sonar work and its smaller recreational yacht-electronics line under one roof until 2005, when Altor Equity Partners bought the recreational division out as Simrad Yachting and Kongsberg kept the commercial and defense Simrad name for itself. That 2005 split is why two unconnected companies, Kongsberg (trading its marine business today as Kongsberg Discovery) and the yacht-electronics Simrad covered on this page, both legitimately use the same brand now.

Altor built its new Simrad Yachting up through further deals: Simrad Yachting had already added B&G, the British sailing-instrument maker founded in 1955, in 2003; Altor bought Lowrance Electronics in 2006 and merged it with Simrad Yachting to form Navico, headquartered in Egersund, Norway, with Brunswick New Technologies' marine electronics division folded in the following March. Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking and Altor Fund IV bought Navico in a 2016 private equity deal, Navico added the C-MAP charting business in 2017, and Brunswick Corporation then completed an outright $1.05 billion purchase of the whole group on 4 October 2021, financed with debt and cash, rolling Simrad, B&G, Lowrance and C-MAP into what Brunswick now brands Navico Group.

Simrad is the saltwater-generalist member of the Navico Group family, sharing hardware with sailing-focused B&G and fishing-focused Lowrance but earning its own reputation on radar image quality, at a price that sits between Garmin's ease of use and Furuno's commercial-grade heritage.

What Does the Simrad Product Range Look Like Today?

The NSX, Simrad's newest and cheapest line, runs the company's ground-up rebuilt Neon operating system rather than the older evo3 software, and lists in three sizes at $1,049 (7 inch), $1,449 (9 inch) and $2,749 (12 inch), each bundled with C-MAP Discover X charts and a built-in sonar module; retail combo bundles that add a transducer commonly cost $100 to $400 more. Panbo's review called the NSX an upgrade over the Simrad Go it replaced in nearly every dimension, praising its route planning and touchscreen response. Step up to the NSS evo3S and the screens grow to 9, 12 and 16 inch IPS touchscreens built around an iMX8 processor, priced from around $2,499 for the 9 inch model to $3,999 for the 12 inch (retailers add roughly $1,600 for a bundled HALO20+ radar), running the older but more mature evo3 software with fuller networking to other NSS and NSO units on the same boat.

Above the NSS sits the NSO evo3S, sold mostly as a bare display for boatbuilders and custom helm integrators on larger flybridge and sportfishing boats, alongside a genuinely commercial NSS/NSO line sold through Navico's separate commercial site for workboats. Radar runs on the HALO pulse-compression family, from the HALO20+ and HALO24 dome antennas (roughly $1,999 to $3,299 depending on range and model) up to larger open-array antennas for bigger boats; autopilots use the AP44 control head ($699 alone, $2,799 to $3,649 as a complete drive-and-sensor pack depending on boat length up to 50 feet) or the larger-screen AP48 head ($1,099); and sonar runs on Active Imaging 2-in-1 and 3-in-1 transducers (around $385) with optional StructureScan and the shared-with-Lowrance ActiveTarget2 Live real-time scanning sonar.

How Does Simrad Compare to Raymarine, Garmin Marine and Furuno?

Panbo's side-by-side comparisons of enclosed dome radars found the Simrad HALO20+ producing the most detailed return of the group, ranked ahead of Garmin's Fantom and Raymarine's Quantum 2, with clearer definition behind land masses than either rival. That radar strength, plus C-MAP's Genesis Live tool for building an owner's own high-resolution depth charts from the boat's own sonar, are Simrad's clearest technical advantages over both brands. Furuno, the fourth name buyers weighing serious offshore or commercial-grade electronics bring up, has a longer history supplying professional and naval vessels and is generally regarded by trawler and passage-making owners as the more conservative, rugged choice, though its TZtouch and newer TZtouchXL displays have historically trailed Simrad and Garmin on touchscreen responsiveness even as Furuno has closed that gap in recent generations.

Where Simrad loses ground is user-friendliness and one specific camera feature: forum posters comparing Garmin and Raymarine consistently rate Garmin as noticeably more intuitive to learn than either Raymarine or Simrad, and Raymarine's LightHouse operating system is the only one of the four with augmented-reality video overlay of AIS and chart data onto a live camera feed, aimed squarely at less experienced boaters piloting close to hazards. Buyers already invested in a Simrad-equipped boat, or wanting the widest single choice of radar and chart depth, gain the most from staying in the Navico ecosystem; buyers who value the single easiest learning curve or camera-assisted piloting have a genuine, not merely cosmetic, reason to look at Garmin or Raymarine instead.

How Much Does Simrad Gear Cost, New and Used?

Every chartplotter price in this report comes from retailers (BoatTest, The GPS Store, West Marine, Defender) rather than a manufacturer list, because Simrad does not post retail prices on simrad-yachting.com itself. NSX pricing runs $1,049 (7 inch), $1,449 (9 inch) and $2,749 (12 inch), each bundled with sonar and base charts; NSS evo3S pricing runs from about $2,499 (9 inch) to $3,999 (12 inch), with the 16 inch model priced higher again but not consistently listed across retailers. Radar adds $1,999 to $3,299 for a HALO20+ or HALO24 dome depending on range, and a full AP44 autopilot pack runs $2,799 for boats to 35 feet or $3,649 up to 50 feet, on top of a $699 control head if bought separately; the larger AP48 head alone is $1,099.

Used pricing shows how fast this category depreciates: owners on The Hull Truth and 2 Cool Fishing report picking up a 12 inch NSS evo3 for around $2,000 against a $3,000 to $3,500 new price at the time, while older NSS evo2-generation 9 and 12 inch units, now two hardware generations behind, sell on eBay for a few hundred dollars, reflecting both age and a shorter remaining runway of software updates. What Simrad does not publish anywhere is a combined price sheet across NSX, NSS evo3S and NSO evo3S, a dealer count specific to the yacht-electronics business as distinct from Kongsberg's commercial Simrad, or any failure-rate or warranty-claim data; every number in this report was gathered from retailers, reviewers and owners rather than the company itself.

How Reliable Is Simrad Gear, and What Actually Goes Wrong?

On Trawler Forum's Simrad woes thread, an owner described a GB40 blackbox system, later replaced by the NSO line, that had random restarts and frequent freezing from day one of ownership; a separate Trawler Forum poster called their NSS12 installation the most unreliable, troublesome electronics system they had used on any boat, with the display locking up and dropping radar and GPS roughly once an hour, forcing a reboot each time. On The Hull Truth, a thread titled NSS 12 Freezing records Simrad's own support team recommending the owner install an older software version to fix the fault, and Simrad has separately acknowledged bugs in at least one specific software release (version 2.5 of the NSS platform) and recommended downgrading to version 2.0 while a fix was prepared.

A 2019 GPS week-number rollover bug affected legacy NSS-series units still in service, and Trawler Forum threads from that period note Simrad's own website briefly offering an incorrect update file rather than the correct fix. The newest NSX platform, running the ground-up Neon operating system rather than the older evo3 code, has a shorter track record: Panbo's review found early software stability issues reported by some users and noted the NSX could not yet fully network with older NSS-platform units on the same boat, but did not report freezing anywhere near the severity seen on the older evo and evo2 generation hardware. Buyers of new gear today are on the newer, more stable platform, but a used or several-year-old Simrad MFD carries a documented risk that a Garmin or Raymarine unit of the same age may not share to the same degree.

What Does Simrad Service and Support Cost?

Simrad's standard warranty runs two years from purchase, activated by registering the unit's serial number at simrad-yachting.com, with the purchase receipt as the fallback proof of date; owners can then buy up to three additional years of coverage during that original two-year window, for a maximum of five years total, a program some dealers market as Simrad Advantage or a 5 Year Upgrade. Every new NSX and NSS evo3S unit ships with C-MAP's free Discover X base charts, but the higher-detail Reveal and Reveal X charts, with denser bathymetric contour data, are a separate purchase, and Genesis Live, the tool that lets an owner build and share their own high-resolution depth charts from the boat's own sonar log, is a software feature rather than a subscription, useful only once the boat has already logged its own sonar data.

Simrad does not run its own single-brand dealer network separate from Navico Group's shared retail and installer base: the same big-box chains (West Marine), specialist GPS and marine electronics resellers (The GPS Store, Defender, BOE Marine) and independent installers who sell and fit Lowrance and B&G also sell and fit Simrad, backed by Navico's own online dealer locator. That shared footprint is larger than a single boutique brand's network, which several Trawler Forum and Sailboatowners.com Forums posters comparing marine electronics brands cite as a practical advantage when something needs fitting or fixing away from home, though it also means a Simrad-specific specialist, as opposed to a generalist Navico installer, is not guaranteed at every dealer.

Is Simrad the Right Choice for Your Boat?

The strongest case for Simrad is a boat that will carry more than one piece of Simrad-branded gear at once: an owner adding a HALO radar dome, an AP44 autopilot and Active Imaging sonar to one NSS evo3S or NSX display gets one connected system with one user interface, backed by C-MAP's Genesis Live custom charting and, per Panbo's own comparison testing, the sharpest radar image among the enclosed dome radars it tested against Garmin and Raymarine. It is a weaker fit for a dedicated sailor who wants B&G's sailing-specific instrumentation, a freshwater angler better served by Lowrance's fishing-first tuning at a lower price, or anyone who has read the freezing complaints on Trawler Forum and The Hull Truth and wants to avoid them by buying only the newest NSX-generation hardware, since NSX still cannot fully network with older Simrad displays on the same boat.

Buyers should budget for the full system rather than a single screen: a genuinely capable saltwater setup combining a 12 inch NSS evo3S, a HALO20+ radar dome, an AP44 autopilot pack and an Active Imaging transducer runs to roughly $8,500 to $9,500 in hardware alone before installation, well above the sticker price of any one box. Anyone comparing brands should also weigh the two-year standard warranty (extendable to five), Simrad's lack of a single published price list across its own range and the now-current Brunswick ownership since October 2021, a change mature enough that dealer support and pricing have settled but recent enough that it still shapes how the brand is positioned against Garmin, Raymarine and Furuno today.

لمين هو: Owners of saltwater cruisers, center consoles and sportfishing boats who want radar, autopilot, sonar and chartplotting from one ecosystem and are comfortable buying through Navico's shared dealer network rather than a single-brand boutique service chain.