Marin, I like what you did with yours and am thinking along the same lines. ..moving things down from above so that I can see them through old guy glasses. ��
Thanks, but I had very little to do with it. The electronics console ahead of the engine instruments and power/shifter quadrants was there when we bought the boat. Made of teak, it sits over what on the stock boat is a chart "well" for want of a better term.
We changed out the radio that came with the boat, and more recently installed a newer Icom than the one in the photo. When the original hailer/intercom nearly started a fire, we changed that out, too.
More recently we replaced the fading Signet depth/speed/time/etc display with a new and improved Signet display. We used the Furuno Loran-C unit at the left end of the console as one of our navigation tools, but of course it's no longer usable. We're still trying to figure out something useful to replace it with.
The only physical alteration we made to the console was to make a level platform for the Echotec GPS plotter on the right end of the console. I laminated a couple of sailboat teak winch bases together to make the base. We installed the plotter within weeks of acquiring the boat in 1998. At the time it was state-of-the-art and was the plotter being used by most of the commercial purse seiners and crabbers in our harbor. It's green-screen display and C-MapNT+ charting system are many generations old now, but the thing still works fine so we still use it.
The very clever drop-down mount in the overhead was also made or custom ordered by a previous owner. When we bought the boat it held the CRT display for a Raytheon 2600 radar. A great radar in its day, its day was long gone by the time we bought the boat. But we don't believe in replacing electronics until they either crap out or no longer provide the function(s) we need them to provide. The 2600 did fine for us but when its CRT display began to die we replaced the whole system with a new Furuno NavNet VX2.
It, of course, has an outstanding plotter function in addition to the excellent radar. Unfortunately the drop-down mount is a wee bit too narrow to accomodate the 10" NavNet without making some serious modifications to the mount, so we went with the 7" version.
We always advocate using the largest practical screen on any display but in this case the thing is about a foot or so away from the person driving so the 7" display is fine. And the drop-down mount is simply brilliant, making the display unit disappear entirely when we don't need it. It retracts up into the flying bridge console.
It also made it dead simple to connect the antenna to the display because our boat has the radar antenna mounted on the face of the flying bridge. So the cable run is about three feet long. We don't advocate this as a good position for a radar antenna but it's what came with the boat and having the antenna lower down like this does offer one signal reflection advantage over a higher mount.
Overall, it's a nice setup and even with the two large-ish plotter/radar displays visibility forward is very good. We modified a commercial chart table to fit over the top of the companionway to the forward cabin, so we can have our big chartbooks at the helm, too. These days an iPad with an excellent charting-only application (Navimatics with Active Captain overlaid on it) sits on top of the paper charts but we still like to refer to the paper.