If I'm not mistaken Cruising World did an article on this in the last 18 months or so. There may be something on their website about it. We leave our back issues in the "reading room" at our marina so I can't look through them for you.

So called "broadband radar" is an arguable marketing term, intended to differentiate one manufacturer's technology from others'. For a fee, advertising agencies come up with these terms that sometimes convey the opposite of their intent. I think this is the case here. I could argue that this version of radar technology is not at all broadband, and that, in fact, it depends on an extremely narrow receiver selectivity (ie, the opposite of broadband) to function.

But the technology *is* different from the 'standard' previously used in this industry, although it has been used in aviation applications for decades.

The first thing about this marine application of a not so new technology is that it dispenses with the high power output vacuum tube (the magnetron) and instead uses a low power solid state device as the transmitter's main element. A magnetron is notoriously wasteful of energy: it splatters its output pulse across a wide band of the frequency spectrum - talk about Broadband! - and its output pulse is not stable...the maggie's frequency varies from pulse to pulse, and even within a pulse. This use of energy forces the receiver to have a wide selectivity that allows a lot of ambient electrical noise to enter the receiver along with the target echoes. A solid state transmitter transmits energy that is more stable, more "pure", not wasting it's "bang" as much in sidebands; this allows the engineers to design a receiver with very narrow selectivity that prevents much noise from entering the receiver. If a maggie radar is a blunderbuss; a solid state radar is a rifle...energy applied inefficiently versus energy applied efficiently.

What's kept maggie radars alive so long is their cheapness. Microwave ovens need high power to warm the strudel, so a solid state power device would never serve in a kitchen. I suspect magnetron manufacturing technology is about as good as its going to get because of this high volume customer base.

The second difference of so called "broadband radar" is that it doesn't use single output pulses and waits to listen for an echo. It uses a continuously transmitting energy wave ("cw"), one that gradually sweeps across a frequency spectrum (while the receiver carefully follows that sweep). In this it is very like the function of an aviation product, the cw radio altimeter. As the transmitter sends out its constantly sweeping energy, it keeps track of that output and compares it to the energy reflected from a target. When the incoming matches the outgoing, that is a target.

So OK, the maggie is eliminated; but so what. Modern maggie radars on boats are doggone reliable. On a delivery I have used an old Furuno to cross the Columbia River Bar at 0300 in pea soup fog that has probably performed flawlessly for 30 plus years. And so long as the radiation hazard is recognized and respected, a maggie radar will serve just fine.

One of the major selling points of 'broadband radar' is supposed to be its target resolution and its ability to see targets very close to the vessel. But my Raymarine, mounted at the spreaders, can see a small buoy barely one boat length ahead...so I find it hard to imagine a benefit of nearer vision than that.

Does the low power radar pick up targets out to the full distance expected? I have no experience with that, and there is little anecdotal evidence one way or the other on the blogs; but surely if it didn't the press would have flagged this as a weakness by now. And I have heard no complaints being voiced.

The BIGGEST DRAWBACK is a low power radar's inability to trigger a RACON. This is a serious weakness, in my view. Aside from this, I think that so called broadband radar would be considered a competitive radar system to consider if one were contemplating a purchase.

(Note: Others' opinions and experiences are welcome here! I remain open minded and would love to be educated and convinced otherwise if any of the foregoing is not on the right track.)

A question worth answering first, Paul, is where do you want the radar to be mounted. If on the mast, then why go with a 24" radome??? An 18" radome will be less of a nuisance up there for your jib to drag across.

In any event, for sailors, a solid state radar probably would have much less power draw than a vacuum tube (magnetron) radar; but there is still that power hog, the display.

It's a Simrad radar, but sold under the labels of Lowrance, Simrad, and B&G. Reading the advertising and reviews in detail, it seems that it has outstanding close up detail, but the range is very weak. It's an excellent choice if you want to sail into harbor, avoid poles & piers, and find your slip on a pitch black night. It's a poor choice if you want to see a rain shower that's 4 miles off.

I'm replacing most electronics on my boat, so I've been reviewing some of the options lately. B&G has provided some special sailing oriented software in their integrated chart plotter. It's really nice. You enter the polars of your boat and the destination point, and the chart plotter will have a live display of the laylines. If you know where you want to go, but it' into the wind, this is a really a cool feature. Not enough for me to go to B&G, but still very cool.

G. Jackson