Plotting ARPA targets on Coastal Explorer

[tanglewood]

This came up in another thread, but better to dedicate a new thread to teh topic of how to make this work.

The background comment was:

"Radar overlay worried me the most. But now that I have discovered that CE can plot targets expressed my the TTM sentence, I have what I really care about, namely targets plotted on the CE chart so I can see clearly where they are in the context of everything else. I just got this working and it's been a huge benefit. If your radar outputs TTM (and I think TLL works too), all you need to do is feed that into CE."

Some number of radars (I don't know exactly which other than the two I have which are the Furuno 1835 and 2117) output a TTM sentence for each ARPA target that they are tracking. If you feed this info to Coastal Explorer, it will plot the targets. The plot is two concentric squares while the target it being acquired, then it turns to two concentric circles with a course/speed vector. It's just like an AIS target, except a different symbol and not as much data. But it's hugely useful for placing ARPA targets in context on your screen. I also use it to confirm which echo returns are buoys, etc.

TTM is a sentence, hence is 0183. There is a corresponding N2K PGN # 128520 Tracked Target Data that carries the same info, but I don't know what radars output it, and I don't know if CE supports it. My experience has only been with the 0183 TTM variant.

To make this work, you will need a free 0183 port on your CE computer. Read the Radar manual and find out what port the TTM sentence comes out on, then wire that port to the free CE port input. Configure the port in CE, and you should be off and running. That's all it took on my system.