This is a bit of a departure from what I normally write here, but today I’m going to talk about our chartplotter, the Raymarine Axiom 2 Pro S 9″. Now, as a forewarning, this is going to be a pretty critical review but I’m not criticizing the software or hardware engineers who built this: the responsibility for the quality level lies solely on management and the bean-counters. They are the ones that determine product priorities and development budgets.
I call this a mini-review because it is not a comprehensive overview of all the software on the Axiom 2 Pro, but focused on what we use regularly and the issues I’ve noticed. With over two decades of experience as a software quality engineer, I’ve got a pretty good idea of why these issues occur in software, and usually a pretty keen eye for bugs and quality issues. Note that I have the latest version of the software installed and have continually kept the unit on the latest software version ever since installing it a year and a half ago.
The Good: It does what it’s supposed to do
So first, let’s talk about what’s good about the Axiom 2 Pro. It has both a touchscreen as well as enough buttons to easily navigate without using the touchscreen–important because the touchscreen is just fine, but not great. The screen looks good in any lighting. The software is mostly pretty responsive. Not to a level that would be acceptable for any app on a modern smartphone or tablet, but least when I bought it the Axiom 2 Pro was far superior to the Garmin units that I tried demos of and comparative to the B&G products.
Using the chart plotter is straightforward, which given the largely non-technical userbase for these products is a very good thing. As long as you’ve set up your boat’s NMEA2k/SeaTalkNG network correctly, things just work out of the box with little-to-no configuration.
Physically, it’s a chunky beast, in a good way, and it’s sealed against the environment all the way around, so mounting inside a console or NavPod for protection from the elements is optional. I have ours mounted on the mounting bracket that comes with it which itself is attached to our binnacle.
The Bad: It’s a mediocre product in many ways
Obviously, it works. It does what it’s supposed to do and does those things reasonably well. The problem comes in the details and in the level of quality engineering they did while making it. An example of just not appearing to fully execute a vision is with the software running the Axiom 2 Pro itself, Raymarine’s “Lighthouse” OS. It’s just a forked version of Android. They have very few apps available for it, depending on what you’ve got installed on your network (such as Victron GX devices) or want to download, but it seems to be just the barest selection possible, some of which barely even make sense on a chart plotter (Netflix?!). Seems like at one point maybe they intended to have more, but without opening it up to community submissions I don’t know what else they might have expected. Downloadable updates for the OS are always well over a gigabyte in size, which implies to me that they aren’t even correctly applying differential patching to the OS. Not particularly friendly to folks in remote areas on limited bandwidth.
Underpowered hardware
While they don’t appear to publish the exact chipset being used in the Axiom 2 Pro (or really many of the hardware details at all), from using it you can be sure that despite the high cost of the hardware (over $3000 USD MSRP at the writing of this article) it feels like what tablets and smartphones were using at least two or three generations of hardware ago. It’s nowhere near as fast and smooth to use as my Pixel 8 Pro (The Axiom 2 Pro was released in February 2023, the Pixel 8 Pro in October of the same year). While OpenCPN for Android on the Pixel 8 Pro and the chart plotter software on the Axiom 2 Pro aren’t an exact comparison, OpenCPN for Android is always smooth and snappy, no matter how many objects, depths, or AIS targets are being displayed. Zooming in and out of the same areas on the Axiom 2 Pro (using Navionics charts, which are very obviously just adapted from the same official Canadian Hydrographic charts I’m using on OpenCPN via o-charts) often results in low-frame rates and “chunking”. For a piece of hardware that costs more than my high-end gaming laptop I feel that I should expect better performance than this.
I had major issues with their HDMI output over time. I’ve got an HDMI cable (using Raymarine’s official water-resistant plug micro-HDMI to HDMI cable adapter) running from the chart plotter into the boat to the TV on the wall in the salon, a run of about 35 feet. While it worked fine for the first few months, after a while it stopped transmitting correctly, usually resulting in a black screen with the occasional flicker of image. Testing a Raspberry Pi 5 I had around (which also has a micro-HDMI output) showed us the wiring was fine, transmitting a 60Hz 4k image without any issues. I sent the Axiom 2 Pro unit in to Raymarine for RMA, and after testing it for a week they said there was nothing wrong with the unit or its HDMI output; I have since gotten around the issue by adding a powered HDMI signal booster into the line near the Axiom 2 Pro.
Chart plotter software needs a lot more attention from QA
I genuinely don’t know if Raymarine/FLIR have actual software QA teams, outsource their QA, or the worst option of all, use “dev ops” as an excuse to not pay for professional QA services, but there are a lot of rough edges and sloppy bits of the chart plotter software that make me wonder.
- The buttons on the navigation app don’t have correct boundaries. Instead of the touch points being the entire boundary of the button (a rounded rectangle), the touch points are the icons themselves inside the buttons, which means that sometimes when intending to touch the button, you’ll instead tap on a map object behind the button.
- Strange issues with anchoring mode. Interacting with the interface within the first minute or so of using the anchoring wizard/setting the anchor alarm, you’re likely to get UI bugs like the anchoring circle centering around the boat rather than the anchor point or disappearing entirely.
- Navigation widgets don’t have transparency settings and text drop shadows are cut off. While they allow you to add a few widgets with various data from your NMEA2k/STNG network, there aren’t any transparency settings, which means that depending on which mode your chart plotter is set to, you might cover up certain controls or data with the widgets. Also, in a UI oversight, the top few pixels of the drop shadows above the text of the widgets are cut off. This general lack of customization and attention to details follows through the rest of the Lighthouse interface.
- Usually, a day or two after anchoring and settling in we start getting occasional, very brief error beeps from the Axiom. This appears to happen when I shut off the radar or the autopilot after anchoring, but I’m honestly not sure–we’ve only even had the luck to see the error appear for a half second a few times and it seems to say something about losing connection to pilot.
- Memory leak. After several days at anchor, or really every 3-5 days in general, you need to reboot the Axiom 2 Pro. There is some sort of memory leak going on here, as after a few days the performance gets worse and worse; my guess is something to do with the track that is recorded by default during anchoring mode, even if/when you delete the track when pulling anchor.
Final Thoughts
I’ll be honest, the biggest thing this entire Raymarine navigation hardware upgrade has taught me is that next time I should do it more piece-meal, more small-manufacturer, more open-source.
The more I use the Axiom 2 Pro the more I wish they’d given sufficient budget to UI design and a QA team. Maybe I’m just not their target market, and the fishing/sport-boat specific stuff that I have no use for is much more dialed in. But as a cruiser on a sailboat, I’m not impressed.