SharpEye radar...look, Ma, no magnetron!
I kid you not when I say I've had my eye on this product for many months. Now some real info has come to Kelvin Hughes' SharpEye Web site, though you have to register to get at it, and there still aren't any actual radar screenshots up yet. No matter, this looks like a major development. SharpEye is a solid state radar transceiver that purportedly uses a tiny fraction of the power demanded by an equivalent scanner, yet is radically better at finding small targets in clutter. It also "extracts the relative motion of targets by measuring the phase of received radar echoes relative to the phase of the transmission." The first shipping product, in June, will only work with large (4 meter!) existing Kelvin Hughes S band antennas, but they're working on X band, and rumor has it that this technology will eventually come to recreational boats. I won't try to explain how "monostatic pulse radar" works, because I don't know, but you can detect the enthusiasm yourself in places like this Navigation News PDF.
This is extremely interesting.
I am yearning for even the slightly better performance I could get from upgrading from a 2kw 18" to a 4kw 24" radar, in detecting small boats.
Needless to say ... I would find it very worthwhile to upgrade the radar on my 39 foot sailboat to this technology if it was made available compatible with my E-80 Chartplotter.