We've just returned from a week's sailing in Mexico on a boat with a
chartplotter, latest available "charts" and
radar. The official
charts of the Mexican coast are appallingly bad.... every where we anchored the plotter showed us to be up to a 1/2 nm "inland".
Making a landfall (or simply negotiating a group of islets or a headland) in the dark in this region without
radar would be scary as hell.
Radar is so much more than a tool for collision avoidance with another vessel.