I'm gonna probably ask a lot of stupid and basic questions so I apologize in advance for that, here goes. Thank you all for the replies, reading through them all I'm more confused then ever. As stated above, it is a great reference but you still have to use your senses to navigate. I feel as if I would have gotten myself into huge trouble if I didn’t have it. Now a year later, I navigate the open water like my familiar neighborhood streets. It has saved me and has given me tons of confidence. I am a first time boater and had no clue of the open waters and how many things that are out there to hit. It has been my best friend in getting me around. Currently, i am still using the G2 Vision over the G3. ![]() However, I was told by a garmin rep as well as saw it first hand that the G2 Vision chip is still more detailed than the preloaded program G3. To my surprise, it contains auto-guidance. With my new unit, I thought I would have to use my G2 Vision chip but the unit came preloaded with the new G3 HD program. I had to purchase the G2 Vision chip to get the option. The coastal G2 HD preload does not contain auto-guidance. You can access all of this in the ActiveCaptain app, and sync/upload it to your machine It will also add other items of interest, and sometimes provide brief descriptions about things like what tide is best to enter a specific cut/channel, watch out for a line of submerged rocks on the South side, the lighthouse keeper is an armed lunatic so steer clear, etc. This will add even more detail to your charts that other users have uploaded, and I found on several occasions where the ActiveCaptain community marked something on the chart that the Garmin pre-loaded charts had not marked. One thing I highly recommend is that you download the ActiveCaptain Community to the charts you download through the ActiveCaptain app. So in my experience, use AutoGuidance as a way to give you a path that *should* take you where you need to go, but be prudent with other Nav aids as well (like your eyes and your depth finder) When we were trying to navigate up the Intracoastal in the dark on the East Coast of FL, following the plotted path provided by AutoGuidance would have crashed the boat into dock pilings, docks, docked boats, and sometimes bring us over shifting shoals and dangerously close to unplotted channel markers (not everything is marked, and not everything that has been marked is marked in the electronic chart of your GPS). When you enter your minimum depth and minimum height (think bridge height over water), and minimum distance from shore, AutoGuidance will plot a path for you that will bring you from point A to point B in the shortest route possible. Unlike the GPS on your smarter phone, AutoGuidance will not typically plot a path intuitively within the confines of a marked (safe) channel. What AutoGuidance looks like it will do for you and what it actually does for you are different things. We did eventually get AutoGuidance to work though Getting the units to update was no easy task. After the update, the AutoGuidance option was now active. ![]() I seem to recall updating the units with the ActiveCaptain app via a bluetooth connection from my phone to the unit. I'm a little foggy on whether you actually need G3 to activate Auto Guidance (I'm pretty sure we only had G2 maps pre-loaded on the units). ![]() During our prep for the Skiff Challenge, a Garmin rep told me that with any new unit registration, you are given one free map upgrade.
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