digital radar

[Len]

While on a recent trip watching the radar display showing that we were engulfed in heavy rain (and high winds), my shipmate told me, when he replaced his radar unit it had to be a digital radome/display. Asleep at the wheel again. I intentionally let facebook and twitter pass me by but I had no idea my radar was old, analog and now obsolete. On that trip I also had to re-initialize my chartplotter in order to stabilize its schizophrenic behaviour. Boats are just like people .

[bottomscraper]

Well our Raymarine Pathfinder died last season and we went with Garmin. We now have Garmin GMR 18 HD and a GPSMAP 4210 display. It is so much better than the old system and it has a much easier to use interface. We do overlay even though we don't actually have a heading sensor, it works ok if you are moving but not very well when stationary, as would be expected. We only wish the old Raymarine died earlier

[Russell]

Well our Raymarine Pathfinder died last season and we went with Garmin. We now have Garmin GMR 18 HD and a GPSMAP 4210 display. It is so much better than the old system and it has a much easier to use interface. We do overlay even though we don't actually have a heading sensor, it works ok if you are moving but not very well when stationary, as would be expected. We only wish the old Raymarine died earlier

Cant you connect your autopilot via NEMA for heading data for overlays?

[bottomscraper]

Cant you connect your autopilot via NEMA for heading data for overlays?

The Raymarine AP has an NMEA 0183 output, it says it is fast enough for MARPA. The Garmin does have a NMEA 0183 input. I haven't been able to find anything in the Garmin documents that indicate if it will actually accept the NMEA 0183 HDG, HDM or HDT sentences that the Raymarine AP generates. The new Radar was installed in a rush last season, we never had overlay with the old Raymarine so at the time it wasn't important. Currently the Garmin chart plotter/radar are not connected to any other system on the boat. It is a stand alone NMEA 2000 system. BTW did I mention NMEA 2000 is great?