I know this is probably falling on deaf ears, but please add support for a modern radar to CE. I currently have a Navico (Simrad, B&G, Lowarance) HALO 24 hooked up to OpenCpn and it works great! These are very good recreational radars with no black box.
Furuno support would also be nice but honestly if I had a Furuno radar I’d probably just buy TimeZero.
Yes,
I have always wished my Garmin HD radar would show data in CE. As I understand it, the radar data does not transit the NMEA network…
Skipper
Correct. The HALO 24 radar I’m using with OpenCpn just plugs into my LAN switch (no black box). If OpenCpn is running, it immediately detects the radar. It could not be more simple.
I like a lot about CE and believe it could be a real contender against TimeZero. But without modern radar support it’s a no go for a lot of people. After all, the big appeal of PC based navigation is not having to buy a brand name MFD just to use radar.
We’d love to support all the radars… Unfortunately they all use proprietary protocols that their manufacturers are not willing to share with us (other than Koden).
OpenCpn is able to support the Garmin radars because they reverse engineered its protocol. That means it works as far as anyone can tell, but it might not handle everything correctly. It also means new models might not work since Garmin could make changes to the protocol and even a firmware update could break OpenCpn’s support. So far Garmin has allowed this to go on, but they could at any moment decide to put an end to OpenCapn’s ability to work with their radars by intentionally changing the protocol to something harder to crack or by adding encryption (which could make it illegal to reverse engineer).
The only way Rose Point will ever be able to add support for your favorite radar is if enough of Garmin’s, or Navico’s, or Furuno’s customers let them know they want it. They have all heard from us, many times, that we want to support their radars, but they don’t care what we want. They might care what you want.