Digital Radar #1, Northstar HD

Northstar 6KW

It’s digital radar Friday. It must mean something when two new scanner series are made official on the same day…a trend perhaps? Northstar’s, hinted at last winter,  is called High Definition (HD) Digital Radar. and it comes in 2kW/18-inch and 4kW/24-inch radomes, as well as 6kW/48-inch, 10kW/72-inch and 25kW/84 inch open arrays. They will work with the 8000i series, mentioned yesterday, and the new 6100i update to the 6000i series (and come October, the Navman 8120 will become compatible with the smaller scanners). The press release, not online yet, boasts of “enhanced Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques, combined with 10-bit target discrimination, provide unparalleled radar images.” I’ve seen quite a few of those images, and they are impressive. Notice how in the one below, bigger here
, the radar is discriminating amongst all those boats moored behind a breakwater in Hobson Bay, New Zealand. Nice!

Northstar radar overlay



Ben Ellison

Ben Ellison

Panbo editor, publisher & chief bottlewasher from 4/2005 until 8/2018, and now pleased to have Ben Stein as a very able publisher, webmaster, and editing colleague. Please don't regard him as an "expert"; he's getting quite old and thinks that "fadiddling fumble-putz" is a more accurate description.

3 Responses

  1. Ron Rogers says:

    Not all buoys show a radar shadow.

  2. Terry says:

    Hmmmm … SOG in ‘meters per second’? That vessel was doing 2.332634 knots … in case you wanted to know 🙂

  3. Fred says:

    Cant wait for the new line of radars from the big guns

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