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

[ukoehler]

Hmm, I am trying to understand the requirements. In the WIKI, 1 Mbps is quoted as minimum bandwidth. My Android devices show a bandwidth of 65 Mbps. Would that open up the door to an android plugin?

Cheers

Uwe

[Douwe Fokkema]

Originally Posted by 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).
Sherry

A reliable heading is essential for ARPA. If the heading is faulty, the location of the ARPA targets is unreliable.
If the error of your heading sensor is constant (the same under all headings) you can correct the error with the menu advanced/installation/bearing correction.

[Dwinson]

Hello, I have a B&G Halo 20+. The radar plug in has been working awesome! My problem is my Zeus 3 chartplotter just broke and the plugin can not find the radar. The radar plugs directing into my ethernet switch. Do I have to have my chartplotter working to get the plugin to work? Thanks for your help!

[Douwe Fokkema]

Originally Posted by Dwinson

Hello, I have a B&G Halo 20+. The radar plug in has been working awesome! My problem is my Zeus 3 chartplotter just broke and the plugin can not find the radar. The radar plugs directing into my ethernet switch. Do I have to have my chartplotter working to get the plugin to work? Thanks for your help!

Normally no plotter is needed. Possibly the plotter was functioning as a DHCP server. Without the plotter the addresses have changed. Find the configuration file opencpn.ini or opencpn.conf and locate lines starting like these:
Radar0LocationInfo=
Radar0Address=
Radar0Interface=
Radar1LocationInfo=
Radar1Address=
Radar1Interface=
Delete these lines. After this the plugin will start locating the radars from scratch. This might work.

[merrimac]

Originally Posted by Dwinson

Hello, I have a B&G Halo 20+. The radar plug in has been working awesome! My problem is my Zeus 3 chartplotter just broke and the plugin can not find the radar. The radar plugs directing into my ethernet switch. Do I have to have my chartplotter working to get the plugin to work? Thanks for your help!

The most likely answer is that the yellow “enable” wire of the power part of the radar cable is linked to the yellow wire of the Zeus. Just tie the yellow wire to the red wire on the radar side.

[Martineke]

hello

under linux and with a wifi 6 network:
wifi6 the laptop
wifi6 the wifi router
ethernet between the radar and the wifi router-switch.

will it be fast enough for a good operation?
thanks

[Hakan]

Normally is a wifi connection not suitable for the radar scanner data structure. It's not about the speed but more how data blocks are handled. Read more here in the manual.
If the wifi 6 is different in this matter I don't know. If you have the opportunity to test please do. Connect first also the PC using a wire to the switch. When you have that working test to use wifi on the PC and check for differences. The WiFi interference is usually much less and disturbed blobs/echoes.

[Martineke]

hello
thanks for the answer.
i had read this part of the manual, but i only see flow rate issues, no compatibility issues, and a failure in the attempt to force a router to increase its basic flow rate.
several brands have radars sold with integrated wifi, raymarine, Onwa.
i think Raymarine has backtracked due to problems with wifi signal interference between the radar and its client.
that's why i thought that going to ethernet from the radar to the switch limited the risks.
and for the moment i am unfortunately not able to test, because i don't have a radar yet, and my laptop is natively without integrated ethernet.
to be continued ��

[merrimac]

Originally Posted by Martineke

hello

under linux and with a wifi 6 network:
wifi6 the laptop
wifi6 the wifi router
ethernet between the radar and the wifi router-switch.

will it be fast enough for a good operation?
thanks

The "problem" with radar over WiFi is that it uses multicast or broadcast which causes the access point to fall back to the _lowest_ data rate not the _highest_ as that is the only way it can know that everyone can read the data.

Thus even if your WiFi 6 network is 2000 Mbit the lowest may still be too low. I tested with a AX1800 dual-band WiFi 6 (802.11ax) router on the 5 GHz radio and I still had dropouts of numerous spokes per rotation, even with just my high end laptop as a WiFi client...

So, not supported is still our best answer.

Once I've finished writing a new radar server and somebody (probably one of the current maintainers which includes me) has written a new plugin/adapted the current one, you can run the radar server on something like a Raspberry Pi or other SBC and then connect to that over WiFi. See https://github.com/keesverruijt/mayara

[merrimac]

Note that using multicast or broadcast is really smart: it means that all stations (MFDs, PCs etc) can all listen to the "same" data as it is being transmitted. This was great on a 100 Mbit network. My "new" solution in Mayara is intended for modern networks where point-to-point gigabit bandwidth is much more than needed for radar, so having 2-5 clients is still not taxing the system.

[merrimac]

Originally Posted by Martineke

hello
thanks for the answer.
i had read this part of the manual, but i only see flow rate issues, no compatibility issues, and a failure in the attempt to force a router to increase its basic flow rate.
several brands have radars sold with integrated wifi, raymarine, Onwa.
i think Raymarine has backtracked due to problems with wifi signal interference between the radar and its client.
that's why i thought that going to ethernet from the radar to the switch limited the risks.
and for the moment i am unfortunately not able to test, because i don't have a radar yet, and my laptop is natively without integrated ethernet.
to be continued ��

The Furuno and Raymarine WiFi version doesn't use multicast. Also, you can't use it with 3rd party WiFi routers, this is expressly forbidden and caught by the hardware. I don't know about the Furuno, but the Raymarine WiFi connection drops off when you attempt to use it with anything but a Raymarine device. They transmit some sort of "I'm really Raymarine" data packets that haven't been reverse engineered.

Wired ethernet in your laptop is just a dongle away.

But hey, if you want to be a stubborn non believer, and think we are all part of a cabal here as developers, go ahead and try it. Just be a man/woman and come back and admit it here if it doesn't work; if it does: please tell us what hardware and settings you used. As I said above, even with a medium high end WiFi 6 router it doesn't for me.

[merrimac]

Originally Posted by ukoehler

Hmm, I am trying to understand the requirements. In the WIKI, 1 Mbps is quoted as minimum bandwidth. My Android devices show a bandwidth of 65 Mbps. Would that open up the door to an android plugin?

Cheers

Uwe

No, see my other recents replies.