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looking to buy a marine radio. Any suggestions on reputable brands?

stay away from a hand held unit if ya can swing it. The price difference is not much compared to the rang difference you will get from having a mounted radio with a 4' to 8' antenna. Just mounted a standard horizon explorer on my boat last night with a 8' antenna. Seems pretty nice so far, Got all the weather alearts for the storms last night sitting in the garage. lol Nice having the piece of mind that you can reach the coast guard or whoever while fishing out deep if ya get into trouble.

Standard Horizon explorer 1700 is a fine radio. Has a built in gps unit that is easy to activate and use to navigate. Very nice screen with easy to see numbers. MMSI programmable and has a 3 year warranty and is an affordable unit. A lot of times they offer rebates on their radios to make them an even better value. I love mine. Also white or black. One other feature this unit can do is interface with a fish finder/gps/ plotter screen using a couple of nmea wires to show the location on screen of your boat and someone else's boat should a distress signal be activated to speed up rescue time.

Most marine radios are good units anymore,and the Standard Horizon is a great radio as Don mentioned. The antenna that you run them on is were the biggest difference is. Some are simply a cut coax cable that doesn't even go half way up and some that are alittle more pricey are internally much better. As with anything else get what you can afford. There are some good buys out there if you look for them and the shakespear 8ft. 5225xt is a top of the line antenna that will give you the optimal distance of your radio.

I put in a S.H. last year - great piece of mind compared to the handheld. I also have the GPS tied to my Fish finder and has the push button SOS that will automatically send out the GPS coordinates if I am in distress. I have an 8' antenna and can generally hear people talking in Michigan when I am on the south end of the lake. I keep the handheld charged and in the boat still since I have it as a secondary in case the boat does go down -I would still have some communications.

Thanks for the replies . I had one years ago and really liked it but it finally went bad and I never replaced it because the inland lakes I fished were not that big.

I use Standard Horizon radios in all my boats. They are good, reliable units.
However, the radio is only as good as the antenna. Look for a high gain antenna and mount it as high as possible. I use Shakespeare Galaxy antennas and have had good luck with them.
Frank from Calumet Marine gave me some good advice that I haven't used yet. he said to use a plastic mount instead of the SS one. That way if you hit the antenna the mount should break before the antenna. It's a lot easier and cheaper to replace a mount then the antenna.