New Standard Horizon GX2400 Matrix VHF - Panbo

Steve Mitchell says: October 2, 2020 at 10:59 am

I’ve had the GX2400 installed now for a few weeks on Rendezvous. I’ve had the GX2200 and GX2150 before, with the GX2200 being a primary radio on this and a previous boat. I also have a host of other radios for testing including a couple of ICOMs, Furuno’s FM-4800, etc.

With the GX2400, I have the RAM4 cabled second station and speaker, plus the 240W outdoor hailer. I also have the newer HX890 handheld from Standard Horizon that I use for testing DSC with the radios.

The GX2200 was a great radio – good all around features, quality sound, and good performance. I liked the integrated GPS in it too, giving you DSC without having to rely on a network connection.

The GX2400 improves on the 2200 in a couple of obvious ways that I enjoy. First, it has a NMEA 2000 port so that if you wanted to connect it to your existing network, you can easily. The 2200 had NMEA 0183 which was fine, but that requires a bit more creative cabling since most of my network is NMEA 2000.

Second, the GX2400 has better quality sound as compared to the 2200 and I assume part of that is newer electronics as well as the noise canceling function they cite in the specs.

Third, I like the green activity light that comes on when someone is transmitting. It’s strange, though, as the light on the remote RAM4 MIC doesn’t do this – it appears to only be usable as a strobe? Seems like an oversight there.

The RAM4 MIC is very nice as well – similar lighting and controls as the base unit, easy to use, and I think the speaker might actually be better quality sound than the GX2400 base itself!

Finally, the updated day/night display and E2O operating system is quite a bit nicer than the older one which was getting long in the tooth. It’s much easier to switch between main functions, see a graphical representation of a feature, and is overall just easier and quicker to use. I really like it a lot.

If I had one thing to complain about it would be the !@#&* GPS which was the same issue with the GX2200. I ended up getting the SCU-38 GPS antenna just in case, as I suspected it might be a challenge. 1 out of 10 times, even with the radio mounted in the flybridge for testing, it would not get a GPS lock. Standard Horizon has no way to override the horrible beeping noise that occurs when this happens, and it drives me nuts. You also can’t override it and tell it to use the NMEA 2000 source alone, and ignore if the internal GPS doesn’t get a signal. Other radios can do this, and as long as they get a valid GPS signal, who cares? DSC should work fine. But SH requires their internal GPS also gets a signal even if there is a valid NMEA 2000 one.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain, as the GX6000 has had it’s share of grumpy NMEA 2000 issues, but I would think now that NMEA 2000 is over 20 years old, radio manufacturers would have figured out how to deal with this sort of stuff.

Regardless of this, I think the GX2400 is an excellent radio that allows for a second wired/wireless station, an updated operating system with day/night screens, and a ton of features all in a very affordable package.

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