18" radomes #3, weirdness edition
I'm beginning to feel a bit different. Who else was pleased to see the fog roll back into Camden yesterday? And what other boat has four 18" radomes mounted, one with velcro...
I can tell you now that all these little domes are pretty darn good. While the Garmin GMR 18 HD still has the least resolution at very close ranges, it's noticeably better than when I saw it onboard a friend's boat last summer. Garmin changed the way it presents MARPA targets, too, along with a slew of other 5.0 improvements. And while I only have a couple of hours with the Furuno DRSD2, it may well be the best of the lot, even though the other two maggies are 4 kW and it's only 2.2. Its scanner may be the smallest too, as UHD 19" refers to the casing size; the actual array is only 16.75" wide, and the claimed horizontal beam width is 5.2�, the biggest by a hair. But one major lesson of this whole exercise is that power and beam width are less important performance factors than they used to be.
Getting back to the weirdness, note the egg taped to back side of the Ray RD418D. This was the idea of my friend and colleague Arnie Hammerman (an imaginative guy). We were discussing the minor controversy over Broadband's safety claims, and Arnie brought up the claim (myth?) that large radars can boil eggs...
Well, egg #1 below spent three hours taped to the Garmin 18 HD dome, #2 is straight from the box, and #3 spent its three hours on the BR24 dome. There were no perceivable differences in their condition, and this was probably a completely meaningless test. But I can tell that ninety seconds in Gizmo's microwave cooked all three to a tasty state. Have a great weekend.
No difference, and the eggs are dissadvantaged compared to our bodies, that have blood circulating continuously to removes heat 100x more than the radars can put out.
Can we all agree that these 4kw radars are 100.0000% safe?