Simrad Radars & Autopilots

Why Marine Radars & Autopilots Are Essential on the Water

Whether you're cruising coastal waters, offshore fishing, or passage-making overnight, a marine radar and autopilot system are two of the most important investments you can make in on-water safety and seamanship. Together, they transform how you navigate — giving you eyes beyond your line of sight and freeing your hands from the helm so you can focus on the bigger picture.

What Does a Marine Radar Do?

Marine radar uses radio waves to detect and locate surrounding objects, painting a 360-degree picture of your environment on a display screen. Day and night, radar systems keep you aware of surrounding traffic, hazards, obstacles, and approaching weather, allowing you to navigate safely in dense fog, rain, or any limited-visibility situation. Modern units go further still — MARPA collision avoidance allows your radar to acquire and track targets of interest, calculating course, speed, closest point of approach, and time to CPA, with visible and audible cues warning you of developing dangerous situations. For anglers, offshore fishing radar can even help you find sea birds above schools of fish.

What Does a Marine Autopilot Do?

At its simplest, an autopilot is a system that maintains a boat's heading on a chosen course — but modern systems do far more than that. Modern autopilots can automatically follow charted courses when integrated with marine charting and position-fixing equipment, and have built-in intelligence that enables them to learn how sea state, wind, vessel speed, loading, and engine settings are affecting the boat. In conditions of poor visibility, the autopilot greatly helps avoid the disorientation you would otherwise experience when manual steering. The practical result: knowing that your heading is being maintained frees up more time to maintain a good lookout visually and on the radar.

Key Considerations When Shopping Radars & Autopilots

• Vessel size and type: The steering mechanism and size of your boat determines what sort of autopilot computer and drive system you'll need. A reversible hydraulic steering pump is used to add autopilot capabilities to outboard or sterndrive vessels with existing hydraulic steering systems.
• Radar type: Marine radar systems fall into two primary categories — open-array or enclosed radome systems. Open-array scanners are made of two parts: the radar pedestal, which houses the electronics and drive mechanism, and the radar antenna array mounted atop.
• System integration: The best setups allow your radar, autopilot, chartplotter, and other electronics to share data over a common network — dramatically improving situational awareness and reducing crew workload.
• Connectivity: NMEA 2000 and wireless connectivity allow autopilot systems to integrate seamlessly with existing navigation systems.

Top Brands in Marine Radars & Autopilots

Raymarine is one of the most established names in marine electronics. The culmination of over 40 years of autopilot expertise combined with advanced aerospace guidance technology, Raymarine autopilots deliver confident and accurate steering control — from self-contained tiller pilots to the self-calibrating Evolution autopilot series for a wide range of power, sail, and fishing boat applications. On the radar side, Doppler technology available on Quantum 2 radomes and Cyclone open-array radars allows the radar to instantly detect targets in motion and display them in a unique color palette — inbound targets in red, outbound in green — for improved awareness in high-traffic situations.

Simrad brings decades of Norwegian maritime heritage to its radar and autopilot lineup. The current range of Simrad autopilots represents over 70 years of experience and development, with a wide range of solutions to suit any vessel type and length. Simrad's Continuum steering algorithm distills years of research and on-water testing into a flexible software solution capable of delivering reliable auto-steering performance tuned specifically to match a vessel's control characteristics.

Lowrance offers accessible, feature-rich radar and autopilot solutions particularly well-suited to fishing and recreational boating, with tight integration into their popular HDS and LIVE chartplotter ecosystem.

Garmin rounds out the category with its widely trusted marine electronics ecosystem. Garmin's Fantom™ technology uses solid-state pulse compression to deliver high-resolution radar imagery with minimal power draw. On the autopilot side, Garmin's autopilot systems, like the GHP™ Reactor series, integrate directly with compatible chartplotters for seamless, whole-system navigation control.