September 30, 2014\
A few screen shots of our Simrad 3G radar in use. Although they call it a 24 mile radar, it has an effective range of about 4nm and we usually run at 1-2 mile range in thick fog. The following screen shots show 3 different ships of various sizes as identified by our AIS.
Kennicott, a 116m passenger ship.
Westrun Titan, a 33m tug towing a huge barge with containers stacked 4 high
Vector, a 40m Canadian Coast guard ship.
All good targets in calm sea conditions at 4 miles, but not so good beyond 6 miles despite all of these being huge.
All of this is running on opensource software. OpenCPN for the chartplotter with a Radar plugin for the radar overlay. Our system is running headless, in that we do not have a radar brain box or radar screen.... everything is happening on a simple laptop PC directly connected to the radar dome via a standard Ethernet cable
BR24radar_pi.dll plugin for OpenCPN can be found here: http://opencpn-navico-radar-plugin.github.io/
More on the radar plugin project here: https://github.com/canboat/BR24radar_pi
A huge thanks to Kees for all the great work!!!!
OpenCPN can be found here: http://opencpn.org/ocpn/download