Furuno Radar DRS4W 1st Watch -Wifi

[rgleason]

It probably won't be long before someone wants to connect this Furuno radar to Opencpn. It appears that wifi is possible. Kees did a review Jan 2013. It is now in the US. Wouldn't it be nice if Simrad had a version that included both wifi and ethernet?

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1st Watch Wireless Radar DRS4W | Marine Radar | Products | FURUNO

Product Detail - DRS4W

[MacClancy]

Furuno and iKommunicate for Opencpn

[merrimac]

The radar wars have certainly heated up with the recent release of IC based transmitters by the other three suppliers.

Since Ray now has WiFi as well I guess the other 2 will follow this lead when they are release a new iteration of their products.

Opening the Ray and Furuno radars up by writing a plugin is of course dependent on a volunteer that buys a radar/MFD combo and starts reverse engineering. Doable, but I guess the OpenCPN devs with an itch to scratch have already committed to Garmin and Navico. Personally I'm more than happy to help someone along who wants to do Ray or Furuno, and in anticipation of that I've reworked the code base of the Navico plugin so that this is easier than it used to be, but I'm not optimistic that someone will actually do this. Certainly I won't be doing this as I have plenty of open source (and paying) work already.

I don't think there is any real pressure on the manufacturers to start creating a common protocol, or to adopt an open protocol. Signal K isn't perfect for high bandwidth binary data either.

[CVAT]

Why do I picture some unscrupulous towboat operator running a denial of service attack at a choke point for navigation just in the hopes that someone is lazy in watch standing, and WiFi security?

[rgleason]

This would not be too funny, but I expect the next big step is wifi chartplotters, with just a power wire, (data, AIS and Radar overlay sent via wifi) and then Solar powered chartplotters with no wire connections.