On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 23:59:24 GMT, Captain Joe Redcloud
wrote:

Furunos are great units! The reason I originally went for Furuno is that it
seems like 95 out of 100 commercial boats seem to have that brand.

I agree with that. The vast majority of commercial fishing boats that
I see are using Furuno's, and the day time visibility on mine is
excellent, even in bright sunlight on the flybridge. The big crowd
pleaser on mine however is the ARP function. It will track up to 10
targets simultaneously and display a speed and direction vector for
each. For any one selected target you can get a data window showing
target speed, course, closest point of approach (CPA), and time of
CPA. Very useful running at night with seriously large shipping
traffic near you, and that is when I most appreciate the longer range
afforded by height. I've never tried threading my way between rocks
30 ft apart but have no difficulty resolving pairs of closely spaced
channel markers at close range. Since the ARP function requires a
digital heading sensor the unit has one other cool trick. It has a
mode where the chart from the course plotter can be overlayed with the
radar image. That function is particularly useful for quickly
determining whether a radar target is a navaid or not.