There’ll come a day when the only display a boater will need is the one on his tablet or iPad. He’ll bring it aboard, place it in a special mount and use the touch-screen to navigate, find fish and control onboard systems, as well as communicate via voice and text. Even today, companies such as Argonaut make special widescreen, sunlight-viewable mobile devices to serve as monitors for boaters. Yet one of the big knocks is that such mobile devices don’t have enough processing power to run marine radar.
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Now Furuno (furunousa.com) has shown that it’s possible to display and even control marine radar on a mobile device. The new DRS4W 1st Watch Wireless Radar combines a compact 12½-pound 4 kW radome with an iPad or iPhone. It uses a free app to display radar returns on up to two devices at once. A small antenna on the bottom of the dome transmits the wireless radar signal to the mobile device. A simple Apple interface lets you change range from 0.125 to 24 nautical miles. With the iPad, you can also determine target bearing and distance. You need to wire 12-volt power to the dome, which draws less than 2 amps, but gone is the large, bulky cable between the radome and display. I had a chance to use it along the Intracoastal near Sanibel, Florida, and found the system to perform flawlessly.
At $1,695 retail, the DRS4W 1st Watch Wireless Radar is a fairly inexpensive way to add this invaluable navigational tool to any boat. It is certainly a significant evolutionary step toward the day when mobile devices become the primary displays aboard our boats.
