Furuno Radar

J

Jimmylee

New member
I just recently installed a Furuno 1623 radar, and have been having a lot of fun playing with it the last few weeks while out fishing. I have played with all the functions and settings and have been very impressed. I haven't yet been out in the fog with it yet and have a question to the group...... which range scale (0.125 to 16nm) do you most commonly use when traveling in fog?

Chip
 
It depends on my speed and target proximity. If coastal cruising at 22knots I set mine to 1.5 or .750nm. If in the inner harbor at headway speed I set it to .5 or .25.

The closer the range the larger the targets and the better the target separation will appear on your display.
 
In fog I'm going to be at hull speed, 5-7kts. I would set the radar at about 1 1/2 miles. My concerns are running into something or something running into me! The radar is really important in the fog. I've had other boats pass right over where I would have been but for my radar warning that let me dodge. It is very very hard to steer a straight course in the fog and the radar helps me do that.
 
We usually have ours at 2NM, or 1NM if in a narrower channel, foggy or not. In more open waters where larger ships are about, we often pop up to 4NM or even 8NM for a short scan further away.
 
Radar really is a beautiful thing. My longest leg in pea soup zero vis outside of the cabin fog was roughly 30nm from Boston to the north entrance of the Cape Cod Canal. I was cruising several miles offshore following a course I had programming in my GPS.

In these conditions you are spending more time with your eyes on the display (99%) than looking anywhere else...there are guys out there running with nothing more than a hand-held gps with no radar at regular cruise speed - scary. I once noticed one such vessel approaching 90 degrees to my port....I slowed and stopped and watched this guy - he kept going - it was not pea soup fog so I was able to catch a glimpse as he passed and it was one guy in a center console staring down at his hand-held. Hi yi yi...good thing one of us had radar! It would have been a high probability of a collision otherwise.

I always run with radar even in perfect sunny conditions so I get familiar with what things look like when you are in fog.
 
At the height that a transmitter is mounted on our style of boat, you aren't going to be able to see out more than six miles. That is of course, you're looking for other small boats and not a freighter. Big ships will be above the horizon so you'll be able to see them on a longer range. It's pretty much a line of sight range with radar on a boat with the dome mounted at two meters above the waterline.
 
It depends on speed and location. I set mine so I can see boats that are 5 minutes away leaving ample time to notice them, determine which way they are going and take any action that I might need to take. In the sound and out at Neah Bay, my biggest concerns are large boats in the shipping lines (or slightly outside of them) and fishermen running at 20-30 kts with no radar (and often no common sense). At 30kts a boat covers 1nm every 2 minutes and if I'm also moving 30 kts, that's 1nm every 1 min for a boat coming from the opposite direction (of course I don't run 30kts in fog). So I tend to have mine set at 4-8nm. I'll also note that how far my radar can see is determined by a combination of how high it's mounted on my boat and how high above the water my target is. E.g. for the large container boats, cruise liners and tankers, I can spot them at quite a distance.

Once I'm in tighter quarters, I'm often down to a .5nm range and if I'm really worried I'm switching ranges regularly to see both the close and the far away. Also, now that I've added AIS to system, I tend to run the radar at shorter ranges since the bigger, fast moving boats are (for the most part) required to broadcast AIS. Then the radar is primarily used to find those overly brave (and sometimes stupidly brave) fishermen running from spot to spot.
 
We sure agree with Roger. In a dense fog, switch ranges regularly. We have some not so fond memories of a high speed Alaska ferry in a dense fog -- range switch saved us from becoming a bow ornament.
 
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