Your radar can see logs and kayaks?! I want one of those! It's gotta be
magic. How many gigawatts does that take to get a return off a plastic
kayak?

I guess you're assuming the guy in the kayak has a metal Coleman stove in
there, too...(c;

We border on the absurd....which is why they'll make them mandatory over X
ft long....and all that go to sea.


Larry

Gigawatts? Woohoo..... we don't want to burn the hair off the poor
guy's legs, just see a wee echo from the fillings in his teeth! Seriously, a
3kw with a weak maggie should be able to see seagulls and ducks on the water
(when the water is flat, of course). I don't have a radar at all, but have
worked on thousands of them. Well, OK, maybe only hundreds. When the short
range, X band radar scanner is fairly close to the water, as opposed to the
mistake of mounting as high as possible, painting small wet objects improves
greatly. I'm sure many are familiar with the impossible sea clutter one
encounters looking down at a high angle from high up on the ship. Painting
any targets at all is a challenge. Oh, yes, it sees those mountain ranges 30
miles away alright, but we aren't apt to hit them soon.
Is AIS used on relatively unmovable objects such as rocks and small
islands? There are quite a few radar beacons in use, but some radar receiver
interference rejection schemes wipe them off the screen too. (I almost said
"scope", nearly revealing my age!)
Christmas? I thought we now used politically correct names?
Old Chief Lynn