Do you know how to swing a compass on a boat? Most boaters don’t, because we’ve become so accustomed to navigating via our chart plotters and GPS that a compass these days almost seems like an afterthought. But much as we modern mariners love our electronic navigational gear, we all know darn well that one day it might not work. Software glitches, electric gremlins and hardware mishaps all happen on boats. And when they happen to your vessel’s electronics, unless you have a lot of familiar landmarks within sight, you’d better know how to use that compass. Just as importantly, you’d better know how to swing a compass on a boat so you know it will give you an accurate reading when you need it most.

What is Swinging a Compass?

All compasses are subject to deviation as the result of interference caused by metal items and/or electrical fields generated by accessory equipment and the wires that feed them. This interference can cause a compass’s reading to be off by a few degrees, or in some cases a lot more. So, all compasses are equipped for small adjustments that can compensate for this interference. Adjusting this compensation is called “swinging” the compass.

How to Swing a Compass

Swinging the compass requires a bit of very simple preparation. First, you’ll first need to choose an area where you have visible landmarks like fixed markers, lighthouses or points to steer for on headings within 10 degrees of north/south and east/west. You also need to be in an area with relatively calm waters without too much current, so your boat’s course over ground is as close as possible to the boat’s actual heading. Then, you’ll need to figure out how your specific compass is adjusted. Most of the time there will be two visible compensators that look like set-screws or visible rods with slotted screw heads, one on the front of the compass and another on the side. If it’s not obvious, refer to your owner’s manual. (If you don’t have the manual handy, a quick Google search can usually provide the answer). You’ll also need a non-magnetic screwdriver or key to turn the screws.

Once underway, take a north-south course, observe your GPS course, and compare it to your compass heading. Note: Always remember to make sure your GPS is set to magnetic north, not true north, because your compass always reads to magnetic headings. If you’re unsure how to do so, refer to your GPS’s owner’s manual.

If the GPS and compass don’t match up, turn the compensator on the side of the compass (generally called the port/starboard compensator) until the compass and the GPS agree. Then turn your boat to an east-west course. Again, match up the GPS to the compass, and if they disagree, this time turn the compensator on the front of the compass (generally called the fore/aft compensator) until the courses match up.

When you’ve performed both port/starboard and fore/aft compensations, turn the boat around and run reciprocal courses to double-check the heading accuracy.

Additional Things to Know to Swing a Compass

If you don’t have GPS, you can still swing the compass using a quality hand-bearing compass held far from any metals or accessories. You can also refer to paper charts with recorded course lines between north/south and east/west landmarks, although this will likely result in a less-accurate adjustment.

Keep in mind that what we’ve covered so far is for swinging a boat compass that has already been installed in a boat. If you’re installing a new one from scratch, you may need to rotate the compass itself, in its mounting position, before affixing it in place to get readings that are close to accurate before following this process. In this case, it’s wise to carefully select the mounting location to keep the compass as far as possible from large metal items or electrical accessories. Also remember that some electrical accessories can affect the compass intermittently, depending on when they’re in use. Windshield wiper motors, for example, are notorious for unexpectedly throwing boat compasses out of kilter.

Finally, note that compass compensators have their limits. It may differ by brand, but a 20-degree limit is common and if your compass is off by more than that, it will need to be partially rotated or mounted in a different spot.

In this age of GPS and electronic navigation, swinging a boat compass may seem quaint. But remember, when those electronics fail you, you’ll need that compass to get back to port. And an error of five degrees might not sound like too much, but if you run for 10 miles you’ll be close to a mile off from your destination. So be prepared for those software glitches, electrical gremlins and hardware mishaps, and swing your boat’s compass before you cast off the lines on your next big adventure.

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It’s one thing to experience computer-assisted docking, but it’s different to ride aboard a vessel that’s autonomously negotiating the nautical road. I learned this during an on-water demo of NeuBoat technology from Avikus at the recent Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show. Our human pilot guided the demo boat out of its slip and into the Stranahan River. Minutes later, his hands left the helm, not to return. While it initially felt strange to place so much trust in silicone and sensors, trepidation morphed into amazement as we transited under the Southeast 17th Street bridge and into Lake Mabel. We passed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gleaming fiberglass, aluminum and steel waterlines, but NeuBoat plotted a safe course through all of it and then back to, and into, the slip.

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is here, and it will only become a bigger, more integrated part of our world in the future. Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest shipbuilder and the parent company of Avikus, is already using autonomous capabilities to navigate ships across oceans, albeit with human oversight. While the NeuBoat isn’t the only autonomous-vessel technology afloat, it’s the only solution created by the commercial-marine sector with the parallel intention of innovating for the recreational-marine market. Avikus plans to offer two AI-assisted products, which can each be spec’d with two levels of operational capability.

The first is NeuBoat Navigation, which should be released in the second half of this year. It is designed to help human operators who are directly controlling their vessels make more situationally aware decisions. The basic option delivers navigational assistance through augmented reality to help skippers make smart choices, while the more advanced option provides navigation assistance along with camera- and sensor-collected informational assistance while docking.

The second product is NeuBoat Navigation and Docking Control, which Avikus plans to release in 2024. It’s a step up. Its basic option will include AI-controlled route planning, navigation and collision avoidance, with humans providing oversight. Its advanced option adds AI-controlled docking.

While  NeuBoat’s operating system and AI are scalable, the two systems (and their options) have different hardware requirements. NeuBoat Navigation installations have a black-box AI recognition processor and NeuBoat’s graphical user interface (GUI), which can be displayed on a compatible multifunction display or an Android-based tablet or smartphone. For a sensor, there is a forward-looking daylight camera and a forward-looking  light-detection-and-ranging (lidar) sensor. If applicable, NeuBoat can incorporate cameras for thermal imaging. Additional cameras and sensors can be added.

NeuBoat Navigation and Docking Control-equipped yachts will employ the same AI-recognition processor and GUI, but will also have an autonomous-control processor and an engine-interface module. Steering is via the vessel’s networked autopilot. The system will also use five to 10 daylight cameras and at least two lidar sensors for 360-degree situational awareness.

Both systems require either two networked global navigation satellite system receivers or a  networked satellite compass to  determine the  vessel’s position, heading and  rate-of-turn  information. The cameras collect imagery that’s sent to the system’s AI-recognition processor, where it’s compared, in near real time, with a growing image database that includes at least 2.5 million images. The system then uses a form of AI called computer vision to sort objects into one of eight buckets: motorboats, vessels, sailing yachts, rowboats, channel markers, buoys, structures or “other.”

“We determine obstacles in the image input from the front [camera] in real time with AI based on the pre-learned image data,” says Lim Dohyeong, CEO of Avikus.

The video stream is also sent to a helm display, where it can be seen by human operators. For navigation, the system can apply augmented-reality-style information tags above camera-captured targets, advising on their range and target type.

As mentioned, both systems employ a lidar sensor or sensors to determine precise distances. NeuBoat Navigation and Docking Control, however, also uses lidar to create distance maps between the sensor and objects in its surrounding environment (for example, docks and pilings) during autonomous docking.

“It scans the surrounding environment in real time whenever it enters or leaves the port,” Dohyeong says. The system basically creates a map from scratch each time—even if the dock is one that the yacht’s owners often frequent—to account for dynamic variables.

In addition to video feeds, part of NeuBoat’s GUI includes electronic cartography and a chartplotter like page view. The information serves as a database that the system uses for auto-routing and autonomous navigation. (For my demo ride, the system used an official electronic navigation chart; however, Avikus plans to integrate with third-party  vector-cartography  products, including C-Map and  Navionics.) This presentation also allows a human operator to understand the yacht’s position quickly, relative to landmasses, channels, navigational marks and other vessels.

As with other self-learning, AI-based systems, the more time NeuBoat spends navigating and capturing video imagery, the better it should perform. NeuBoat will be supported by biannual software updates.

While NeuBoat products have yet to be released, Avikus is working with several marine-electronics manufacturers on projects that will allow NeuBoat to incorporate third-party equipment, including AIS and radar, for collision-avoidance work. As an example, Avikus has signed a memorandum of understanding with Raymarine to collaborate on integrating NeuBoat technology with Raymarine’s product portfolio and to explore the  future of autonomous recreational  vessels  overall.

As of this writing, Avikus plans to let owners purchase NeuBoat Navigation as OEM equipment aboard a new build or in the aftermarket during a refit. Dohyeong says NeuBoat Navigation can even be added as a DIY project. Owners interested in NeuBoat Navigation and Docking Control systems will have to wait until they’re offered aboard new builds, but Dohyeong says aftermarket upgrades could become available for that system too, as its auto-calibration technology advances.

While adoption rates and boaters’ willingness to entrust potentially consequential operations to artificial intelligence remain an open-ended question, our test boat successfully navigated and self-docked. The gleaming nearby waterlines, I’m happy to report, remained unaffected by our autonomous passage.

Heavy Metal

In addition to NeuBoat,  Avikus builds HiNAS 2.0 (that’s  Hyundai intelligent Navigation Assistant System) for commercial mariners. In 2022, HiNAS 2.0 helped navigate a carrier full of liquefied natural gas across an ocean with human oversight. The ship’s fuel  efficiency increased by about 7 percent. Greenhouse-gas emissions dropped by about 5 percent.

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Two weeks before Christmas, when most Americans were ready to relax with friends and family, the U.S. Coast Guard command center sprang into urgent action. The 30-foot Catalina Atrevida II was not where it was supposed to be. Sixty-four-year-old Kevin Hyde, 76-year-old Joe DiTomasso and his dog Minnie had left Cape May, New Jersey, on November 27 for a cruise to Marathon, Florida. For a while, everything went fine. According to news reports, DiTomasso was known for losing his phone, so his family didn’t worry after the men left North Carolina on December 3 and then went silent.

But by December 11, that quiet was deafening. The US Coast Guard Fifth District Command Center in the mid-Atlantic was notified. Rescuers immediately issued urgent alerts and reached out to commercial vessels in the search area. Multiple aircraft and cutters were launched; vessels from the US Navy’s Second Fleet started searching.

By the time a tanker crew spotted the Atrevida II more than 200 miles off the Delaware coast, 10 days had passed. The boat was dismasted. The men were exhausted. They had no fuel or power. All their radios and navigation equipment were dead.

What likely saved their lives was the fact that they were waving a green flag—pretty much their only remaining option.

The Human Factor

Kevin Ferrie knows stories like this one all too well. He’s a retired US Coast Guard commander who now serves as a civilian with the US Coast Guard Office of Auxiliary Boating & Safety.

“The majority of accidents that are in our database—the root cause is human factors. Somebody did something or made a poor judgment call,” he says.

Ferrie knows what’s behind those statistics on a level that most boaters never will. He also provides shore-side support for the annual Salty Dawg regattas that guide groups of sailors down the East Coast to the Caribbean and back. And he’s a long-distance cruiser himself, having sailed from Maine to the Caribbean aboard a 45-foot Jeanneau with his wife, their four kids and a pair of Labrador retrievers. He once found himself in a situation where his autopilot broke, and he needed to use an Iridium Go! as well as a Garmin inReach to communicate with shore-side help. He didn’t need 10 days to start losing his mind; disorientation from trying to fix the autopilot hit him in a day and a half.

“It was in the lazarette. I had to pull out all this gear to get to it and contort my body in all kinds of ways,” he says. “Off and on, it took me like 36 hours to fix it, including communicating offshore and waiting for responses. I was exhausted.”

All his experiences have taught him one overarching lesson about offshore cruising: Preparation is key. “The minimum federal safety standards are important: You need your life jackets, your distress signals, your VHF radio,” he says. “But that’s really baseline. If you’re heading offshore, it’s not enough.” 

Communications

In terms of offshore preparation, communications technology that lets boaters summon help includes everything from cellphones and VHF radios to personal locator beacons and EPIRBs. Having as many types of communication as possible available is key, he says, because, in a lot of cases, simply being able to call for instructions or help can stop a bad situation from escalating into a dangerous one.

One recent example he encountered was with a vessel that lost its rudder this past fall off the East Coast. The husband and wife who were aboard set off their EPIRB and used their Garmin inReach to communicate with the Coast Guard and shore-side support.

What the couple initially feared was an emergency became a solvable problem because they were able to communicate, and because they knew other people were keeping track of them.

“At first, they were like, ‘Oh, my God,’ and we had to help them get through that mental problem,” Ferrie says. “Ultimately, they ended up with the Coast Guard arriving on scene and towing them in. But with help, they were able to make way toward the coast and rendezvous for help. They had the communication devices and the spares. They needed somebody to say, ‘It’s OK. You’re prepared for this.’” 

The Float Plan

Next on Ferrie’s list of important preparations for offshore cruising is filing a float plan. The US Coast Guard has a float-plan form online—for free—that boaters can download, fill out and leave with a responsible person ashore. It includes details such as the boat’s make and model, and the types of communication devices on board, and details about where the boaters expect to be, and when—all information that rescuers will need if the boat doesn’t show up where it should be.

In the case of the Atrevida II, family realizing the boat was overdue was a key component in the search efforts. That information is the essence of what makes filing a float plan such an important step in the offshore-cruising process. A float plan can sometimes be a boater’s only way to “signal” for help if an onboard emergency develops quickly.

“In a fast situation, the float plan is incredibly important because you may not even have time to make the mayday call,” Ferrie says. “Fire can happen really quickly on a boat. It can block access to everything except your way overboard.” 

Shore-Side Support

Having designated shore-side support people is different from filing a float plan. With shore-side support, a boater has volunteers or paid professionals helping to keep an eye on their course and anything happening around them, including developing weather systems.

“It’s more of an active person that’s watching out for your best interests,” Ferrie says. “With shore-side support, they’d be proactive and reach out to you. They’d say, ‘Hey, did you know this? Are you watching the weather? This is what I’m seeing heading your way in 12 hours.’”

Having shore-side support in place keeps everyone’s mind at ease both on the boat and ashore, he adds. During the Salty Dawg rallies, boaters are required to check in with the shore-side support teams at fixed intervals. Everybody involved knows that as the boats are making their way down the Atlantic coast, a failure to check in means something has gone wrong. For a boater having an emergency offshore with no other way to communicate, simply knowing that shore-side support people will take action can make all the difference between staying calm and panicking, which makes the onboard situation worse.

Safety Gear

Buying a bunch of top-notch safety gear and loading it onto the boat is not enough, Ferrie says. All the gear in the world won’t do a boater any good if he doesn’t know how to use it. “If you just buy a life raft, but you don’t know how to deploy it or what’s in it, that’s bad money spent,” he says.

Life jackets are a hugely important safety-gear requirement. According to the US Coast Guard’s most recent boating-accident data, 81 percent of fatal boating accidents involved people drowning, and some 83 percent of those victims were not wearing life jackets.

“Offshore, you should always wear a life jacket, and, with the inflatable designs, there’s no excuse about comfort anymore,” Ferrie says, adding that for sailors, “you also should always be attached to the boat. Run jacklines from the stern to the bow and clip your life jacket into them.”

He also thinks of communication devices as a form of safety gear, if boaters understand what each device on board can, and cannot, do.

“A personal locator beacon is basically an EPIRB for a person,” Ferrie says. “It will alert the authorities that there’s an emergency. But there’s also an AIS MOB beacon that alarms any boats in the area with AIS and gives them the position. So if you went overboard at night and the crew were sleeping, a personal locator beacon would not alert the crew, but an AIS MOB would wake them up.”

As for life rafts, they’re not required for offshore passages, but Ferrie highly recommends having one on board. He urges boaters to take advantage of the opportunities that come with every life raft’s required service intervals, which are a great time to learn how that particular piece of safety gear works.

“If your life raft is due for a service, talk to the service company, and be there when they open your raft,” he says. “Examine the raft. Visit the facility, and understand what rations come in the raft. Do you need more emergency rations? A ditch bag? You need to prepare that, and it depends on where you’re sailing. A coastal hop down the East Coast of the US is a lot different from a 30-day passage to the South Pacific. You have to think about how long it might take for people to find you.” 

Spare Parts

When Ferrie thinks about spares, his mind takes him to places well beyond parts and tools. Yes, those things are important, but he thinks about spare everything—including food, water and fuel—because in an extended emergency, a boater may need more than a 10 percent reserve of all three.

Carrying extra water is a must, he adds, because human beings can survive without food for a while, but not without water.

“Water tanks offshore can get contaminated in rough weather if you have saltwater intrusion,” he says. “Don’t count on being able to make water in a rough sea state. Have some water in five-gallon jugs.”

Many decisions about which spare parts and tools to stow boil down to the individual vessel and what its critical points of failure could be. “A lot of it’s in steering gear, the halyards if you’re sailing, fuel filters. If it’s rough, you may stir up sediment in your tank, and if you do that, you’ll have clogged filters,” Ferrie says. “You need to know how to fix that and have the critical spares on board.”  

Crew Endurance

Having enough crew so that everyone can be focused on-watch and resting off-watch is also “a huge one” that Ferrie thinks about in terms of preparations. If whoever is at the helm is exhausted when something goes wrong, the odds skyrocket of a solvable problem getting worse.

“There’s a saying: People typically break before the boats do,” he says. “At some point in a heightened-stress situation, it becomes a mental game.”

He adds that boaters should never, ever get themselves into a situation where they will feel forced to arrive at or depart from a certain location on a specific day or at a specific time, for any reason.

“You need to understand the weather,” he adds. “There’s a saying in cruising: If you have visitors coming, you can pick the location or the time, but you can’t pick both. When you’re forced into a schedule, you tend to make poor decisions. You feel like, ‘I have to get to this island because my mom’s going to arrive.’ Be patient, and wait for the weather window that suits your skills and ability and your boat.” 

Take Classes

Another key piece of advice is to  take boater-education courses. Many people wrongly assume that only beginners need classes; in fact, every page of this article includes a sidebar about advanced classes available for powerboaters and sailors alike. Classes can be taken nationwide, not only for offshore route-planning and passagemaking, but also for gaining a detailed understanding of how communication devices and mechanical systems work.

Everything a boat owner learns in those classes can be passed along to other crew members, including those who join a passage only for a short leg at a time.

“Think through possible worst-case scenarios and how you would respond to them,” Ferrie says. “Do that as an exercise with your crew. What would you do in a man-overboard situation? Do they know to stop and stare and point at the person?”

Yes, simply being able to keep eyes on a boater in trouble can sometimes make all the difference, as it did for the Atrevida II. After the tanker crew spotted the sailboat’s waving green flag, both the men and Minnie the dog were able to get aboard the tanker and hitch a ride back to New York. The men were exhausted and beaten up from the weather. They were taken to a hospital for observation to make sure they didn’t have hypothermia. One described his legs as feeling like rubber from trying to stay upright for so long.

But they both lived to tell their tale, just like the more than 75,000 people the Coast Guard Office of Auxiliary Boating & Safety has saved during the decades since its inception. And in a bad situation, that’s the statistic any offshore boater ultimately wants to be.

Learn the Basics

America’s Boating Club (previously known as the US Power Squadrons) offers an entry-level course for beginners who want to learn the basics of everything from navigation to safety equipment. This course also meets most states’ boater-safety education requirements.

Add New Skills

Boaters who complete the America’s Boating Club basic class can move on to higher-level courses. One course focuses on offshore navigation, with lessons in things like celestial navigation as a backup in case GPS equipment fails beyond the sight of land (and landmarks that can be used to navigate back home). This course also covers ways to set offshore navigational routines.

Cruise Planning

Another class that America’s Boating Club offers is focused on cruise planning. It covers how to plan a longer-term itinerary, as well as equipment the boater may need, key safety gear, crew training, communications, dealing with weather, handling emergencies and tips for cruising outside the United States.

Teaching the Tech

Yet another class that America’s Boating Club offers focuses exclusively on marine communication systems. It helps students understand the differences between VHF radio, the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, radiotelephones, long-range communication systems and other technology that can help keep offshore boaters in contact with civilization.

For Sailors

The American Sailing Association has more than 300 schools across the United States as well as locations in other countries. After passing the basic keelboat sailing class, boaters can advance to basic coastal cruising, which teaches lessons focused on operating a boat during the daytime with wind conditions up to 20 knots.

Advanced Sailing

Upper-level classes from the American Sailing Association include advanced coastal cruising and offshore passagemaking. The passagemaking class is designed for boaters who want to sail extended offshore itineraries that will require celestial navigation. Sail repair, offshore first aid, abandon-ship protocols and other skills are also part of this course.

It All Comes Down To Preparation

“The minimum federal safety standards are important: You need your life jackets, your distress signals, your VHF radio. But that’s really baseline. If you’re heading offshore, it’s not enough.”

Basic Problems To Avoid

According to US Coast Guard accident data, top problems include operator inattention, improper lookout and excessive speed.

Main Types Of Boating Accidents

The US Coast Guard’s top five are collisions with other boats, collisions with fixed objects, flooding/swamping, grounding and falls overboard.

Watch The Weather

The US Coast Guard’s top 10 factors contributing to accidents include weather, which killed 30 people in the most-recent-year statistics available.

Being Offshore Is Different

The US Coast Guard’s most recent data shows that more boating accidents happen offshore in the Atlantic Ocean than in any single state. 

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Raymarine has inked a deal with Rhode Island-based NorthCoast Boats to provide navigation equipment and YachtSense digital switching for the builder’s full line of 2024 model-year boats, including the flagship NorthCoast 415HT that is expected to become available this fall.

“We are very excited to be able to provide NorthCoast with every component for its flagship 415HT’s electronics suite, as well as for all future builds across their product line,” Grégoire Outters, general manager of Raymarine, stated in a press release. “NorthCoast has long been regarded as a premium yacht manufacturer, and their 415HT is going to go above and beyond by offering the smartest boating experience ever.”

The NorthCoast 415HT will have a helm with two Axiom 2XL 19-inch multifunction displays and a RMK10 remote; RealVision MAX 3D sonar with CHIRP DownVision and SideVision sonar; a Cyclone 110-watt, 4-foot open-array radar with CHIRP pulse compression and beam-sharpening technology; and an AR200 that supplies GPS position, compass heading, pitch and roll data to Axiom chartplotters. It can also (when combined with the onboard FLIR M364C multispectral marine camera and CAM300) use video-stabilization capabilities to enable ClearCruise Augmented Reality features.

What does Raymarine’s YachtSense digital switching do? It’s a modular backbone that supports control of the vessel’s systems, with lighting, pumps, hydraulics and HVAC all integrated for touchscreen control.

Take the next step: go to raymarine.com

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ACR’s ResQLink AIS Personal Locator Beacon is the first to leverage the automatic identification system (AIS), the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), and the 406 MHz and 121.5 MHz frequencies. This multi-signal beacon gets position information from its GNSS receiver, and then bundles and transmits that information to a Cospas-Sarsat satellite via its 406 MHz transceiver. The beacon also shares its position information via AIS frequencies with nearby AIS-equipped vessels; it alternates its AIS bursts with 121.5 MHz transmissions that can be received by rescuing authorities.

“The real challenge of this product was trying to design an all-in-one product that meets our customers’ expectations,” says Mikele D’Arcangelo, ACR’s vice president of global marketing and product management. The solution, he says, involved miniaturizing circuit boards, bundling previously discrete componentry, and ensuring that the beacon satisfied AIS MOB and personal-locator-beacon regulatory requirements.

The ResQLink AIS Personal Locator Beacon measures 7.87 by 1.41 by 1.18 inches, weighs 0.42 pounds, has a 24-hour operational life, is waterproof down to 33 feet for up to one hour and comes with a five-year warranty.

How It Works

ResQLink AIS Personal Locator Beacons have near-field communications antennas. This tech lets ACR store all a beacon’s technical information in the antenna, which can be interrogated by a smartphone that’s running ACR’s Beacon App without draining the beacon’s internal battery. ResQLink AIS beacons are compatible with the Cospas-Sarsat Return Link Service, meaning an on-device LED illuminates when a beacon’s signal is received. The beacon also has infrared- and white-light strobes and can be fitted into a PFD to activate automatically if the PFD inflates.

Take the next step: acrartex.com

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High-power (100- and 200-watt) versions of the NXT radar are now available, and thanks to Doppler technology and Furuno’s advanced software, interpreting the radar returns are easier than ever before. Target Analyzer turns targets red if they’re potential hazards and green if they aren’t, while the Fast Target Tracking function displays target vectors in seconds. And no matter how large or small your boat is, there’s an NXT model that will fit perfectly; options include a 24-inch dome and 3.5-, 4- and 6-foot open arrays.

Price: $2,600 (DRS4D-NXT); $5,400 (DRS6A-NXT); (DRS12A-NXT and DRS25A-NXT upon request)

Contact: furunousa.com

See the complete 2020 Marine Electronics Guide

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Raymarine’s DownVision, SideVision and RealVision 3D step up to a new level of resolution with HyperVision chirp 1.2-megahertz sonar technology, delivering lifelike detail and triple the clarity of traditional side- and down-­imaging sonar. Quad-core processing power provides continuous 3D rendering, and blazing-fast redraws. Added bonus: The included HV-100 all-in-one transducer makes for easy installation. Double added bonus: Raymarine RealBathy self-mapping sonar capabilities are built in.

Price: Starts at $649.99 with transducer

Contact: raymarine.com

See the complete 2020 Marine Electronics Guide

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Driven by MotionScope Doppler technology, the GMR Fantom 18 is a 40-watt, solid-state dome radar that includes a new perk: A target-size setting, which assists in differentiating real targets from noise. Major highlights include pulse compression, which enhances detection and maximizes energy, along with dynamic auto-gain and sea-filter settings, low power ­consumption and instant start-ups.

Price: $1,999.99

Contact: garmin.com/newmarine

See the complete 2020 Marine Electronics Guide

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The GMR Fantom 126 is Garmin’s most powerful ­solid-state, open-array radar, utilizing 120 watts of power. Employing MotionScope Doppler technology, users can detect and highlight moving targets in different colors to avoid collisions, track the weather or find flocks of birds. Pulse-compression technology allows for maximum target identification while also displaying high-resolution imagery. And let’s not forget the new True Echo Trails feature, which leaves a tell-tale trail from moving targets.

Price: $8,499.99

Contact: garmin.com/newmarine

See the complete 2020 Marine Electronics Guide

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Owners of smaller boats who want serious tech in a relatively compact chart plotter/fish finder will find the 7-inch GP1871F and the 9-inch GP1971F to their liking. TruEcho CHIRP, C-Map 4-D cartography, a 72-channel internal GPS with WAAS, and an intuitive interface are all part of the mix. Systems can be expanded with the DRS4W radar and NavPilot autopilots.

Price: Starts at $945

Contact: furunousa.com

See the complete 2020 Marine Electronics Guide

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