Peacetime Dividends

There are untold benefits of peacetime. The best one, of course, is the fact that nobody is shooting at anyone else. But even now, the U.S. military must be ever-vigilant, and it is continually updating its equipment to include the latest advances in technology. The civilian benefit--or so-called peacetime dividend--of all of this is simple: We get new products and services thanks to a process called trickle-down technology.

Consider GPS, for example. Through our tax dollars, the government developed it and paid for it, but we get to use it. Another example is night-vision equipment. Here, the government paid suppliers to develop the technology, and a few years later boaters discovered night-vision equipment on marine-store shelves. Now, thanks to a military supplier called Raytheon, boaters are once again able to benefit from trickle-down technology, this time in the form of a new fishfinder and radar. These new products include the very latest in high-tech signal processing, yet they are specially designed to provide professional-grade features to the small-boat owner. And when it comes to fishing, these products will eliminate most of the technology advantages that the big sportfishermen have enjoyed for years.

To be successful in the big leagues of fishing, you'll need three main items: an electronic chart display (which tells you where you are), a powerful fishfinder (which tells you where the fish are), and a radar (which tells you where the other guys are). Unfortunately, these units tend to eat up huge amounts of dashboard space and money, and that has always posed a problem for the average small-boat owner. But now Raytheon Marine has an answer with three new, high-tech LCD products.

The first of these new units is Raytheon's Raychart 620. This monochrome LCD electronic chart display (ECD) boasts a 10-inch diagonal screen, and when it's loaded with a C-MAP NT cartridge, it can show you detailed chart presentations of almost anywhere in the world. And because it's just 1.5-inches deep, it can be flush-mounted into nearly any small-boat console. But what about the rest of the package? That's where the new L750 fishfinder and Pathfinder radars come in.

Though these units were in the final stages of pre-production testing, I got an early chance to test them aboard Raytheon's 29-foot HydroCat fishboat. Also aboard were Raytheon marketing manager Keith Wansley and national sales manager Lyle St. Romaine. We were in search of bluefish, and if this crowd couldn't catch fish, there was gonna be hell to pay. Obviously, the pressure was on.

As we idled out of the harbor, Wansley explained the unique concept behind the new LCD radar. "Basically," says Wansley, "the antenna determines the model, and it's the first radar we know of that can accept a variety of different antennas."

With a compact 18-inch radome antenna as on our test boat, the radar has a 24-mile range, 2-kW of power output, and is called the SL72 (the "2" in 72 refers to the power output). But if you opt for the larger 24-inch dome, the range increases to 36-miles, the power output doubles to 4-kW, and the unit becomes the SL74. In and of itself that's fairly unique, but the horizontal beam widths of these antennas is what's most surprising. Thanks to a redesign of the antennas, the SL72's beam width is just 5.2 degrees, and the SL74 narrows the beam down to 3.9 degrees. Since a narrower beam means better target discrimination, I expected--and saw--clear separation of close-together targets onscreen.

For example, we came across a string of small sailboats moored in a line, and the SL72 clearly showed the spacing between them. This performance is critical since it tells you how many objects you need to avoid. And unlike the fuzzy screen presentations found on some LCD radars, the Pathfinder's resolution was razor-sharp,. But target discrimination and a sharp picture are just the beginning.

"These new radars are fully automatic," says Wansley. This means they not only adjust tune and gain, but they also make adjustments for sea clutter (STC). In addition, a new feature helps eliminate clutter around own-ship's position, and this lets you see targets that are very close to you, which is important for close-in navigation and collision avoidance.

Another feature commonly found on radars is called "target expansion." This feature generally takes a weak radar echo and magnifies it on screen. But on the Pathfinder radars, Wansley says a military-based technology called "azimuth integration" lets the radar lock onto low-lying sailboats, runabouts, and other small targets that might otherwise be missed by the radar beam.

"When this radar sees a target, it looks for the weaker edges and amplifies them to provide a more pronounced target. And that's without using target expansion to magnify things. When you use our target expansion, you actually get a power boost, and this is a feature normally reserved for the larger commercial radars."

Wansley demonstrated this as we cruised past a series of lobster pots that were marked with small radar reflectors. On a lesser radar those targets may have been overlooked completely. But on the Pathfinder they showed up clearly as individual targets, and in dense fog you could actually navigate your way through them safely.

Other key features include two VRMs/EBLs, user-selectable range scales down to 1/8-mile, a "contact-sensitive" cursor that displays a pop-up menu whenever it touches an item onscreen, two guard zones, four levels of grey, and a display that Raytheon says is 20-percent brighter than traditional LCD displays. For my part, I can tell you that the screen contrast and visibility are excellent. The SL72 will carry a list price of $1,895, while the SL74's price tag is $3,095.

The same kind of thinking went into the new L750 fishfinder. This is a 500-watt, dual-frequency, LCD fishfinder with a 2,000-foot depth range and optional side-looking capabilities, and one of its main advantages is in its transducer. Unlike traditional fishfinders which use ceramic elements to emit sonar signals, the L750 has a very sensitive plastic element in its sidelooker that Raytheon originally developed to hunt submarines and underwater mines. Wansley says, "The element can resonate at any frequency, and we can actually focus the sidelooker beam to eliminate side lobes [secondary pulses that may return false echoes]. That's something you can't do with a ceramic element." A focused beam is important since all of the unit's power is aimed horizontally, not vertically. As such, it does not return false echoes due to sidelobes reflecting back from the surface of the water, and shows the true distance to fish or rock ledges nearby. We tested this by idling through a series of small rock islands, and the unit kept us midway between them.

But sonar navigation is, of course, secondary to catching fish, and the L750 let us see the bluefish coming before they grabbed (or stole) our baits. Using the easy-to-follow menus, we divided the seven-inch screen into six windows--two showed numerical and temperature-graph data, two more showed the bottom in the wide- (50-kHz) and narrower-beam (200-kHz) modes, and the last two showed A-scopes of both frequencies for real-time warnings of when fish were directly below the boat. The unit has fish I.D. symbols that indicate whether a fish was detected in the narrow or wide beam, along with other features including bottom lock, four levels of zoom, and a white-line feature to separate fish from the bottom. In short, it has virtually all of the professional features the big sportfishermen use, but at a fraction of those unit's size and price. The L750 lists for $1,079 with a transom-mount transducer, or $1,349 for a thru-hull transducer.

Taken together, both the L750 and the Pathfinder radars are a cosmetic match--they have identical cases and control buttons, and their menu-driven operation make