Radar Network Data Format

[wind_magic]

This is a question I think very few could answer, but we do get the odd engineer in here, so I am taking the chance ...

Does anyone here know anything about the data used by some of these ethernet based radar devices ? Devices such as the Garmin radars are capable of transmitting radar data to the chart plotters where it is displayed, but I wonder what that data looks like, how it is formatted, if it can easily be decoded, etc. I doubt there are any published formats on it since it is a proprietary standard, anyone know anything about it ?

I guess hooking one up to a network analyzer you could probably figure a lot of it out, it must just be the data from the sweep in real time delivered as some kind of an ethernet packet. But they could be doing anything with it, they could be delivering it as an image file, or doing compression on it, or any number of things that would make it hard to decode.

Anybody ever looked at it at a low level ?

[Idiens]

Try http://www.panbo.com/

[Hartley18]

I won't claim to be an expert on the subject, but the set-ups I have seen have been "compressed video" - from my reading a while back, I don't think it was all that proprietary and suspect MPEG, but I've never looked into it that deeply due to lack of time and equipment.

(My passing interest was in communications the other way: GPS data on radar sent in NMEA format that allows things like precise position/speed/distance tracking of multiple targets for automated collision avoidance... then I moved on to other things.)

--Cameron