- Mar 10, 2004
- 5,113
Simrad Halo Radar
A new wave in recreational radar technology has just hit the market from Simrad. It is called HALO. HALO is actually a CHIRP radar. Many people associate CHIRP with Fishfinders, but it really is short for "Compressed High Intensity Radar Pulse". It has traditionally only been available on high end commercial and even military radars. But now Simrad has made it affordable, and it is amazing. There is lots of technical jargon behind it, and we'll provide a great link to an article our friend Ben at Panbo wrote. But we will try to boil it down even further.
HALO works by sending out a burst of frequencies. To oversimplify things, think of it as sending out 3 discreet frequencies. Each frequency is optimized for a certain range but will ignore the other ranges. So the first frequency focuses on close range, the second is for medium ranges, and third for long range. These bursts happen every sweep of the radar. On your Simrad display you can view any of these ranges at any time, or multiple ranges at the same time with no loss of signal quality. Because of it's "CHIRP like" bursts it is putting more energy on each target, and the technology allows it to refine each target even further with each sweep. We have seen these radars track a single bird in testing, literally.
It is Solid State technology and does not require a magnetron. You can stand right next to this radar and not have to worry about radiation. Only compatible with Simrad NSS & NSO evo2 Units.
For further info check out this great articlefrom Panbo, and this informational videofrom Simrad.
Simrad HALO Radars:
- 3' Open Array - HALO-3
- 4' Open Array - HALO-4
- 6' Open Array - HALO-6
