Apelco Marine Electronics Legacy is Still Living On

Apelco marine electronics are often found on older used boats and advertised in the classified sections of Craiglists. Although this line of fishfinders, chartplotter and VHF radios are of excellent quality, original designs coming from Raytheon’s Marine Division, finding technical support for Apelco’s products can be difficult, that is unless you look on Raymarine’s web site.

Apelco, the former Recreational Marine Division of Raytheon, was acquired by Raymarine several years ago. Raymarine still supports the Apelco product line, (which includes marine VHF radios, GPS enabled fishfinders and chartplotters) as legacy products.

On Raymarine’s web site you will find detailed documentation not only on how to operate all of Apelco’s equipment, but also the information you need to repair the devices. The documentation on Apelco’s devices not only includes detailed operating instructions, but the actual electronic schematics of fishfinders, giving you some insight into not only how to repair, but design and build a fishfinder, GPS unit or chartplotter.

For example, the VHF-FM Radiotelephone’s instruction manual for the Clipper 82, gives complete installation and operating instructions, detailed electronic schematics, electrical specifications, and the data sheets and application notes for the integrated circuits used in the design. But there’s even more. The documentation also includes a good deal of generally useful boating information, like a map of all the Coast Guard stations.

If you’re looking to find out more about the Apelco’s XCD 241 LDC fishfinder, you will find complete documentation on the Raymarine web site as well. That documentation includes everything you need to know to operate, maintain and repair your fishfinder: Electrical specifications, transducer accessories, transducer and transom installation are all completely laid out with old fashioned and easy to read pen and ink illustrations.

If you’re looking for GPS navigation capability in your fishfinder, and want to know the basics about GPS and sonar, you can look at Raymarine’s Apelco 560 Fishfinder/GPS documentation.

Once you review the literature, you can see that even old time products have many modern and useful features. The Apelco fishfinder, besides being water proof, having a split screen layout, and a 128X 160 pixel SuperTwist LCD, comes complete with what you need in sonar; a scan forward water depth of 600 feet and dual beam transmissions.

Beyond fishfinding, the GPS chartplotter also has numerous navigation features, These include two GPS navigation modes, a waypoint node, plot mode, route mode, and a course deviation indicator. Overall the GPS can store 10 routes and 200 waypoints.

The 560 originally came out in 1998 priced at $820.00 with a transom-mounted transducer and $1,135.00 with a bronze hull transducer. But that doesn’t mean you’ll pay anywhere close to that today. Looking on Craiglists you’ll find Apelco units, still in the unopened box, in the $20.00 to $50.00 dollar range.