Raymarine

        Raymarine Inc is based in Merrimack, NH, with engineering facilities in Fort Lauderdale, FL, a major business unit in the UK, and a manufacturing arrangement with a Singapore-based corporation, Flextronics, whose principal assembly plant is in Hungary; truly an international arrangement^[1]. It is a relatively new brand-name in the MNR domain, although it shares a decades-long corporate history with what is now Raytheon Anschütz, becoming a separate and independent company only as recently as 2001. This independence stemmed from a management buy-out which transferred Raytheon Company's entire recreational marine product-line, not just its radars, into Raymarine.

        The division of corporate assets may cause confusion to the unaware, since there are several radar models pre-dating the split that bear the Raytheon brand name. This is most obvious with the Pathfinder series, as copyright ownership of the Pathfinder label was transferred to Raymarine, although it continued in use by Raytheon Anschütz for a time. Further confusion may arise because of a 1958 corporate action, in which another radar manufacturer, Apelco, was absorbed into the Raytheon corporate structure - indeed, it was this very acquisition that led the company into the recreational marine electronics domain. Thus, Apelco might be considered the natural parent of Raymarine, with a temporary adoption by Raytheon. It is not known whether any Apelco-brand radars operate today, but Raymarine holds all Apelco copyrights; because of this, Apelco systems for which documentation could be traced have been included in this section, for completeness.

          The scope for confusion over nomenclatures is even further exacerbated by Raymarine's practice, since corporate independence, of treating its radar systems as peripherals in overall navigational complexes, an increasingly common practice in marine electronics. In consequence, a single radar design may have many "associated-system" identities. This affects the extensive SL- and RL- series, all of which use one of the six available Pathfinder-series radar systems; so, to simplify tabulation, rather than characterize all of the associated systems, the Pathfinder series are described and then cross-indexed to the SL and RL series. Finally, it is fairly common Raymarine practice to describe its radars by their video units: the C- and E-Series multifunction navigational displays incorporate radar/chart video-integration facilities.     

        The published characteristics of the Raymarine inventory are described in Appendix 1. Appendix 2 (available only by subscription) which originally studied the behaviors of three Raymarine products held on the inventory of the Naval Research Laboratory, has been updated in this edition following studies of two further systems. Further studies may be added in future editions.

---