Radar plugin v5.0.0 released

[Skyking69]

All,

I emailed FURUNO and did not even get the courtesy of a reply. I also emailed to a link at https://navigationlaptops.com/marine-radar-on-pc/. At the suggestion of Ivan G at that website I am posting here about a non-traditional marine radar application I am trying to develop. I do NOT want to hijack this thread, so if my post is doing so please get a forum moderator to move it to a standalone thread or delete it and tell me to repost.


I will paste a slightly modified version of an email I have sent to some people. I urge all of you to read the Washington Post article that I mention and link to below. Much thanks for any feedback. If there are any suggestions at all, to quote Ross Perot "I'm all ears."

Best Regards,

Phillip


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To Whom It May Concern:

I am an officer in the Red River Valley Amateur Radio Club (RRVARC), a small ham radio club in Northeast Texas. We are in a doughnut hole without radar coverage. The topic in general was greatly written up by The Washington Post and with permission reprinted on our Club website at Radar gaps threaten millions as severe weather season ramps up in U.S. Further, even if a source becomes available they will be commercial interests wanting to control what we do with the data; too much expense and too much control. To try and solve our problem for ourselves we are in the initial stages of researching something like the Furuno DRS12AX or one of the units discussed at this link Marine radar on PC.

We are looking at options to populate a Google Maps web page displaying ham radio operators, geographic features and a weather radar layer, among other optional layers. The discussion at the Marine radar on a PC (linked above) kind of leads me to believe it might be possible to do this. My questions to you are:

• Rather than outputting to a proprietary display, is there a radar unit that supplies an output that can be used to supply a data stream via an Internet connection?
• If so, is the data format the details on the Marine radar on PC page (i.e. GMR 624 xHD2, GMR 1224 xHD2, GMR 2524 xHD2, GMR 18 xHD, GMR 424 xHD2, etc.)?
• Google Maps in general plays well with KML and KMZ files. Do you have any suggestions for how to harness the output of a radar and do an inline live data conversion so that it can be served up on a KML/KMZ layer?

I have done a couple of hours of digging and do not find where anyone has done what we are trying to do. It is hard to believe that a potential solution for less than $10,000 hasn’t been fully developed for communities like the one we serve, but it isn’t looking promising at this point. Any answers and/or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,

Phillip Beall ( W5EBC)
Secretary, RRVARC
Cell: 214-729-6182

[merrimac]

I'm happy to report that there is now a Beta version for the radar plugin available for testing with O 5.9 beta. The radar plugin version is v5.5.3-beta.

If you switch to the Beta catalog, you should be able to get this version, even on the new Macs running Apple silicon.

Please test this in combo with the O beta, we'll release a production release soon.

There are only a few bugs fixed in the plugin, mostly to do with how AIS is drawn on the PPI.

Regards,
Kees

[SoggyPaws]

Installed with no issues (W11 Pro). Seems to work OK. First time I've played with automatic Arpa on. Very cool to be able to see the ARPA targets on the chart without having to have the radar overlay on the chart. (our heading sensor is a little off, so it's distracting to have the overlay on near land). I'm not very experienced with radar, especially with the plugin on OpenCPN. If there's something specific I can test for you, let me know. We're in a bay with 10 or so little boats running around, most without AIS, and a few big boats at anchor or underway, mostly with AIS.
Sherry