Well, almost.  Can’t quite see through physical objects, but now we CAN see through the fog.  RADAR!   (Specifically, it’s the Furuno 1723 C/NT    We now have a radar system for Charisma.  Also, as long as we made the fairly significant effort to put in the radar, we added GPS and AIS to the mix (all Furuno).  The bonus is that all three overlay on a single 7 inch chartplotter display.  Very cool to be able to see the GPS depiction of where you are–which we’re all fairly used to at this point–but in addition see an overlay to the chart of where radar says you are along with the “blips” that depict “returns” (boats) moving across the screen.  Again, something that’s been around, but only fairly recently available as an integrated image on the same screen (overlay).  The new addition though is to have the AIS display showing large ships (generally over 100 tons like ferries, tankers, freighters and the like) along with their name, course, speed, MMIS frequency so you can hail them on VHF by name, and much more.   The nice thing about this feature is that it’s broadcast over VHF frequencies, so you can “see” ships 20 or 30 miles away!   The install was fairly complicated and I’m glad I had it done at a boatyard.  Pulling the radar cable down the mast requires the mast to be unstepped.  This meant the radar cable had to be cut as the plug wouldn’t fit in the mast conduit and then re-wired via a junction box where 12 very tiny wires had to be connected and again the same 12 wires had to be attached to the plug at the chartplotter end.  Not too difficult but tedious and ripe for error.  Then a fluxgate compass had to be integrated into the system so the radar/gps/AIS all had the same heading data to ensure correct orientation on the chartplotter overlay.  The GPS antenna had to be run and finally an extra “add” was a switch that allows us to determine which GPS information to display at the helm (I left in the “old” Garmin 396 for backup/redundancy).  Lastly a VHF splitter so we could run the AIS on the same antenna as the VHF.The tough part of the whole set-up turned out to be the fact that the 7″ Furuno only has three ports.  One was used for the fluxgate compass input.  One for the data out to the B&G system at the helm.  One left to combine the GPS and AIS input. Problem is both of the latter two have different data transfer speeds, so integration is tricky.  In fact, we first tried a non-Furuno AIS because it was less expensive.  Wouldn’t work, so we had to opt for the more expensive Furuno proprietary solution.  As a side-note for the techies who might read this: I think it could have been “forced” to work, but it would have required dropping the baud rate on the AIS from 38,000 to 4,800 to “match” that of the GPS.  A big data transfer penalty.All the work done by KKMI in Richmond, California.  I have to give them huge kudos.  Very responsive.  Highest integrity and great to work with.  Also very proactive.  When a problem arose (the AIS integration issue), they were very quick to identify and solve.  Huge difference over other yards I’ve worked with and I highly recommend them.  They gave a detailed estimate up front and invoicing was comprehensive and accurate. Now I just have to learn how to use the damn thing.   Just look at all the new buttons to learn!