January 2009
The idea of overlaying a transparent chart onto a radar picture has been around for some time.
But now Swedish company Sea Cross has combined a Koden black-box radar with a dedicated marine computer, to produce what UK distributors CA CLase are describing as a “high-speed radar”. At first I thought they meant “radar for high speed boats” – which would just mean that the scanner goes round more quickly than usual – but it quickly transpired that the “high speed” bit refers to the way the picture is processed.
In plotter mode, this means that the position is updated five times a second, which makes the update slightly smoother than some, but is hardly an earth-shattering advantage.
But in radar mode, high-speed processing means that the computer is able to look at the chart, and predict what the radar image should look like. It can then compare the predicted image with the actual image, and highlight any differences in a different colour.
The result is that anything which is not on the chart (such as ships) stands out as red blobs instead of yellow ones – a big advantage, particularly inshore and in coastal waters, where it can be difficult to pick out ships and other boats from amongst the clutter of buoys and beacons.
With its plotter based on “officially-approved” but rather clunky S57 cartography, and prices for radar packages starting at over £20,000, it’s pretty obvious that Sea-Cross is aiming mainly for the commercial market. It would be nice to think, though that we might see their “non terrestrial object enhancement” trickling down to recreational systems.
www.seacross.eu
