Gear

Marine Electronic Gifts for Boat Owners

The best marine electronics gifts for 2018.

By Boating Tech Team

Updated: October 10, 2018

Give the gift of accurate navigation, correct depths, and the ability to see further, through black of night and thick of fog! Give the gift of music, resounding across the waters! Give the gift of communication! Give the gift of safety! You can give many of these things at once, when you give marine electronics as a boating gift this holiday season.

More Gifts: We’ve got a large collection of the top boating gifts! Check out more of our gift guides, here.

Aquatech iPhone Dive Case

I heard about it and thought, hmmm, really? Then I saw it. The Aquatech dive case turns your iPhone into a legit underwater camera, offering full control of the function buttons through the watertight housing. It’s easy to install or remove the case, and adding a triggered pistol grip to it just adds to its convenient underwater use. $199 ($99 pistol grip) Boating Magazine

Garmin InReach GPS Communicator

Give your favorite boater some added safety for the next excursion. The Garmin InReach handheld GPS is preloaded with maps and a satellite subscription capable of sending brief messages or an SOS to a 24/7 rescue center to call in the troops in case of an emergency. Link it to your phone to download U.S. NOAA charts or aerial maps. $399.99 Boating Magazine

Garmin Panoptix Livescope

The Panoptix LiveScope is the gift that keeps giving with high-resolution images of structure, bait, and fish swimming below and around the boat in real time. The transducer can be mounted on the boat’s transom or on a trolling motor. It’s compatible with a wide range of Garmin EchoMap and GPSMap displays. $1,499.99 Boating Magazine

Icom M85 Handheld VHF

Icom’s M85 is a small waterproof radio packed with a lot of features, and that makes it a great gift for boaters. It has all the VHF channels plus 100 land mobile channels, as well as a built-in voice scrambler for private communications. The M85 is full of the features you need, including an automated emergency alarm. $299.99 Boating Magazine

JBL Xtreme 2 Portable Bluetooth Speaker

This wireless Bluetooth speaker is waterproof to IPX7 standards and can deliver up to 15 hours of music before recharging. And in a nice touch, the carrying strap sports a bottle opener to help quench anyone’s thirst while rocking out. It’s a very cool stocking stuffer. $299.95 Boating Magazine

Raymarine Axiom Pro With Drone Function

If the angler on your list likes drones, he or she will love Raymarine’s Axiom and Axiom Pro multifunction displays with integrated controls for drones. They include a single button to launch, track and record video. They also have a GPS link for various “follow” modes and real-time video streaming. Starting at $649.99 Boating Magazine

Raymarine Dragonfly 7Pro

The prop-repair business is getting tougher every day thanks to better, more compact navigation. This is an insurance policy against expensive groundings. It’s compact and can be loaded with either C-Map or Navionics charts, and it includes Raymarine’s DownVision imaging for sonar readings and photolike structure images. It’s an impressively powerful navigation tool and available at a terrific price with C-Map Essentials USA charts. $549.99 Boating Magazine