New Install - Radar Couldn t see Giant Tanker Ship 100 yard

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personalt

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I helped transport a Meridian 341 cabin cruiser last weekend. The display is TZTouch2, at the sea trial the dome was not powering up so they replaced it. I think they replaced it with a DRS4DL+ or at least one that looks similar. I dont think it was set up right. It did pick up 'stuff' but nothing we could match up with our surroundings including a two really large tankers that passed us within two hundred yards.

How can we tell if it was set up right?

On a related note, we tried to enable overlays on the chart. It did give us the 'button' to turn the transmit on/off but we never saw an overlay. Is this another setting issue?

Thanks for any consideration..
 
It sounds like the radar is mounted around some blockages and maybe getting RF reflections that cause the radar to tune down and filter out targets that it normally would see. Do you have photos of the installation?
 
Thanks... This is kind of a stupid picture as the radar is cut off but it was the best that I had. I will try to find a better picture when home. The radar was mounted on the existing mount that old radar dome was One of the things that we often saw in open water was two tails. Would the wake show up in the radar image? Thanks..
 

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Yes, the wake can show up on the radar. By the looks of it the radar is pretty far back and with the rise of the bow, lots of your radar signal might be shooting to the sky instead of the water. The aft end of the radar is picking up the wake very good because it is digging into the water. It also could be receiving some RF reflections from the metal supports for the soft top. I would first recommend wedging the radar by about 4 degrees and testing it.
 
Thanks.. I do think this could be part of the problem but I do think it might be more then that as we couldn't even see this is boat as it passed us.

is there anything on the electronics side that we need to do in order to set it up properly? Based on some other things they did(or didn't do) during the prep I bet they just plugged this in saw that it put something on the screen and called it a day.
 

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Is there a heading sensor supplying data to the MFD and do you see that data (presumably from an autopilot)? Overlay won't work without it. As for the radar, you need to go into the radar menu and choose "source: and make sure the correct radar model is specified. You may also just want to or perhaps just go ahead and choose "set radar to factory default" to reset and have a clean slate.

I am guessing that maybe there are settings from the old radar dome that carried over?
 
There was a heading data indicator on the Furuno displays but I think you might be right that there wasn't a heading sensor. I think the heading that we had was the 'gps' based heading as it seemed to jump around a bit when we were stationary. I think what we need to do is find a way to see what all the devices are on the NEMA bus cause it does look like he has some cool things like a rudder sensor.

I think you are right, we should check the source setting in setup and reset everything else to defaults.
 
Furuno made the SCX20 and SCX21 because maybe you could get heading from a GPS if one put four GPS antennas into an array and triangulated between all four of them.

Without heading the system just won't allow for certain features to work. ;)
 
point-1 gps antenna will give radar overlay on chart and heading.. but will not work with auto pilot. it does work with target analyzer also.
 
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