Radar

Radar is an upgrade that is invaluable for some locations, and a nice to have for others. Originally we tried to make due with just AIS (a system that shows boats on a chartplotter), but being in a foggy climate, it adds a nice peace of mind.

Which Radar to Buy

Wanting to limit weight aloft and expense, we choose a ~20” dome radar. We quickly decided on a “Solid-state radar” rather than a “Magnetron radar” because of safety and lower electricity usage. The best radar you can buy in this size is a Furuno. Not just because of the name brand, but because it has the best (and debatably) only true “ARPA” functionality at this size. However it’s also the most expensive, and doesn’t integrate with our Garmin electronics. We next looked to Garmin in order to integrate with our chart plotter, but Garmin locks down their radar so it doesn’t work easily with the OpenCPN Radar Plugin. This pushed us to Simrad as it’s more open, and worked slightly better in this review for our use cases.

Radar Mount

Due to the Junk Rig sails we are not able to mount on the mast, and opted for a radar pole. Based on this review we looked at solutions from Edson and Garhauer before deciding on a solution from Garhauer that was cheaper and included a “manual leveling system”. The Edson solution we considered was meant to drill through the deck and be reinforced with fiberglass sheathing below, while the Garhauer was meant to be through bolted to the deck. Both have optional struts for added stability. From our research through bolting to the deck and struts would have provided more than enough stability. However being a double ender, we have very little room to add a radar pole on Paperwing. The only spot that would work, would cause the junk rig main sheet lines to rub against it or be hit by the rudder.

This lead to trying to make our own solution using “Cross Over Brackets”, and suspend the pole with struts. We would use the same struts from Garhauer, but provide our own “Cross Over Brackets” from the antenna industry and shorten the height a bit of our own aluminum pole. This was much cheaper than Edson, and we found a place to powder coat and weld another aluminum plate to the top to match the holes in our Simrad autopilot. However at the end of the process we realized that the marine industry uses tubing with a 2” inner diameter, where the antenna industry uses tubing with a 2” outer diameter. The Garhauer website doesn’t specify if their 2” is inner or outer diameter, but we were told it was 2” inner. We couldn’t find a single cross over bracket that would work for the new size beside this incredibly expensive one from Edson.

Since we had to buy the Edson cross over bracket, we bit the bullet and ended up buying their kit with the brackets, flanges, attachment plate, and aluminum plate included. Their pole was “anodized”, and that is superior to powder coating and something we could not find for a reasonable price locally. All that to say, if you want a long term off the shelf solution, Edson is probably worth the time savings over custom. If you have more time, the job can be much cheaper, and many people make capable systems out of 4” PVC even. We opted to not worry about a self leveling system as we mainly use radar for fog, and the radar itself compromises somewhat for not being level. If you’re sailing in the higher latitudes with wind and fog, self leveling might be worth it.