Redundancies That Will Give You More from Your Electronics
We’re awash in acronyms these days, and it’s making our boating lives better. Tracking targets electronically has long been simple, thanks to the MARPA (Mini Automatic Radar Plotting Aid) that many radars have long added to their quiver of features. But couple it with the AIS (Automatic Identification System) and you multiply the effectiveness of both systems. Busy harbors in low-light or foggy conditions never had a chance to cross up mariners when pitted against this kind of collision avoidance. AIS shows a boater where targets so equipped with a transponder (including many devil-may-care commercial vessels) are located, where they’re headed, and how quickly, and gives you a vessel name to simplify radio contact. On many of today’s systems, a boater can overlay both AIS and radar on a chart. This makes it easy see which targets don’t have AIS, and use the MARPA specifically to track them.
Double Your Cartography
Once upon a time, the electronic chart on the plotter was the only one that a boat could use. Nowadays, some systems allow you to look at multiple charts, all at once, even side by side, on a split screen. What better way to compare data than to have a raster and a vector next to one another, or even two brands of cartography, all the better to make a decision. After all, it’s your running gear that will be touching bottom, not any single cartographer’s—may as well use the best available information to make your decisions.
Band Together
Multiple types of radar are a cool, if recent, development. Some of the new solid-state radars have been maligned for questionable effectiveness at long ranges, but that will cease to matter to anyone when they’re effectively coupled with traditional pulse radars. Rather than take one off to add the other, why not use them in tandem? (A good installer will know how to make this most effective) The pulse radars are better than they’ve ever been, thanks to wildly effective signal processing, while the solid-state systems bring radar effectiveness closer to the boat. If you haven’t seen that demonstrated, ask your installer or seek one out at a boat show. The possibilities are … wide ranging, to say the least. —J.Y.W.