Key west radar in motion install#

An added bonus is that it allows charts to show proper orientation relative to the boat's bow when the boat is at rest (normally, without motion to establish a course and heading using GPS, the charts will just spin around randomly). This is where I ran out of time last weekend, so the remainder of the project trickled along a little bit each day this week after work.įirst thing I tackled this week was installing the Garmin Steadycast heading sensor, which is required to overlay radar on charts reliably. The power wire was run down the rear port leg and network was run down the rear starboard leg, reuniting in the console where I crimped on new ends (the network cable just uses a standard ethernet connector). I clipped the console ends off the Garmin network and power cables, and fed the wires down through the strut and mount, above the electronics box, and over to the legs of the t-top (which are open at the top, where the frame sits under the canvas). So with the plate mounted, it was time to run wires and mount the strut. After some thought, I decided to just drill access holes through the electronics box to let me get a socket wrench up under the t-top to tighten nuts. Underneath, the electronics box blocked direct access, and I didn't want to screw around with removing the e-box, or removing/re-lacing the canvas. I contemplated tapping the holes in the t-top and just threading directly into that, but decided it probably wouldn't be a sure bet since this was a difficult location to work (I was standing on the gunwales, reaching over the t-top). One challenge was getting access underneath to bolt everything together. A soldering iron was used to make clean holes in the canvas, then I drilled through the aluminum plate on the t-top and mounted everything down with 1/4-20 screws and a small amount of 5200 to seal the canvas back up. I wiped off a layer of spring pollen, put down some masking tape, and used a pencil and punches to transfer the mounting hole pattern.

Here's a picture of the plate, wedge, and strut, stacked upside down on the dome for a quick mockup:Īt that point, it was time to mount the wedge and plate to the t-top. The plate was made out of 1/4' aluminum 6061-T6 then primed and painted silver, and the wedge was made out of 1' black starboard and shaped with some advanced table saw kung-fu: I settled on a 5' ScanStrut PowerTower 150 strut and began to fabricate a mounting plate and wedge to attach it to the 203 t-top. With that angle known, some simple geometry showed I'd need about 5' of rise for the radar beam to clear the front edge of the t-top frame, and this would also help the radar shoot above the rocket launchers at the rear. I planned for about a 4 degree down angle for my radar mounting to offset the bow up angle and be somewhat in the middle of the angle range. But the 203 had minimal options for mounting, so I had to start from scratch.Īfter locating a small 4'x8' plate in the middle of the top frame, I made some angle measurements with the boat at rest and under way, and found that the angle of the plate ranged from about 0 degrees to 6 degrees (bow up). On some other boats, if you're lucky, you just need to mount the dome and run the wiring.

Key west radar in motion install#

This project turned out to be somewhat involved, as I had to fabricate a mount plate for the 203 t-top, install a strut, run wiring, and mount the dome. While prices have come way down on the Garmin HD and xHD domes, the new Fantom dome introduced some really compelling features and it made sense to jump to this new model.

I have been wanting to install radar on my 203FS for a couple years now, and finally had one too many experiences navigating in fog.