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Comparing Forward Looking Sonars for Navigation
As with many technical products, understanding the differences between navigation sonar products sold by different vendors can be confusing. Much of the technical product literature can be confusing with different companies assigning different meanings to similar terms. At trade shows, we are often asked "What's the difference between Company X's product and yours?" or "Which is a better? FarSounder's sonars or Company B's sonars?". We don't like to presume we know every detail about every sonar on the market. Rather, we believe that once a customer understands which metrics they should be considering they can easily choose the best "look ahead sonar" for them. For our customers' class of ships, we're confident that they will choose a FarSounder. In this blog posting, we'll take a look at what we feel are the most important metrics you should use to compare forward looking sonars: Coverage Zone and Update Rate.
Chart Overlay Makes Collision Avoidance Easier
When looking at our software's 3D Sonar display it is sometimes difficult to correlate what we see on the screen to what we see (or don't see) out the bridge window. However, many users are used to correlating what they see on a radar display, especially if they have a radar overlay on top of electronic nautical charts. In our continuing efforts to improve user experience, we've recently added chart overlay of in-water sonar targets to our software. This enables users to more quickly and easily make the jump from what they see on the sonar's display to where potential navigation obstacles are located.
In-Water Target Stabilization: Showing Exactly What You Need to See
Due to natural variations in fluid characteristics (such as water temperature, salinity and density) and the presence of small in-water reflectors (such as moving currents, marine life, and bubbles), the underwater environment is acoustically dynamic and often unpredictable. That’s why we at FarSounder have committed ourselves to building incrementally smarter tools to help keep our customers on the edge of technology and as far from harm’s way as possible. As a result, we’re happy to give a sneak peek of our most intelligent underwater collision avoidance system yet, capable of stabilizing in-water targets detected by the sonar and providing you with the most accurate representation of the water in front of your vessel to date. Our new stabilization feature relies on tracking in-water targets detected across multiple transmit/receive cycles (i.e. “pings”). By grouping these detections and monitoring their movements over time, we can use that information to both filter out unreliable targets, and fill in gaps where we are confident targets should be seen.