One of the drawbacks of Forward Looking Sonar has always been that sound travels much more slowly through water than radar waves travel through air. At about 1400 metres per second, it takes half a second for a sonar "ping" to travel out and back to an object a quarter of a mile away. So for a scanning sonar to build up even a crude picture of what's ahead can easily take several seconds.
But Interphase's latest PC-based forward looker captures its entire 90 degree field of view with a single ping, using phased array technology to transmit several beams at once rather than scanning a single beam from side to side. The result is that at very short ranges it can refresh its screen image up to 24 times per second, and even at its maximum 1200ft range, the picture is updated twice a second – two hundred times faster than previous Interphase units – in either vertical or horizontal scanning mode.
Early versions of the Ultrascan hardware consist of a through-hul l or transom mounted transducer and a red “black box” processor with an Ethernet connection to a PC or Apple Mac, though it’s almost certain that later versions will be compatible with mainstream multifunction displays from manufacturers such as Furuno, Garmin, and Raymarine.
The list price, from UK distributor Mantsbrite Marine Electronics, is £5004.33 for the complete system (excluding the PC)
www.interphase-tech.com
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