One of the cool things about our Furuno 2117 black box radar is that the hardware is secondary to the software. The hardware is basic, robust, and powerful. It is the software, that controls the various functions like signal processing and scanner, which gets out of date. The fact that the software can be easily upgraded is one of the reasons we decided to go with the 2117 in the first place.

When Matt Dankoff, the regional Furuno sales manager, was aboard a few weeks ago he checked on our software version. When our unit shipped a year and a half ago Furuno was at version 13. They are now up to 33, so Matt arranged for Harris Electric, a Seattle area dealer, to update our system.

The radar processor resides under the deck on the port side, on a slide-out shelf (as do most of the other electronics black boxes). That’s the radar processor in the gray box shown in the middle of the photo above.

Sean Kidwell is the tech from Harris Electric. Once the processor has been slid out from under the deck Sean removes a couple of fasteners to expose the inner workings.

For such a powerful radar, there doesn’t seem to be a lot inside the case. There are, however, an enormous bunch of wires connected from the computer screen, antenna scanner, remote control, and various inputs like B and G, GPS, and AIS receiver. All of these items are connected via easily removable plugs.

With various items unplugged, Sean then connects his laptop and goes through the process of updating four different suites of software on the radar.

We were surprised to see the files were running in DOS mode, and with the slow serial connection the process takes about an hour.

At the end of each section of software update the radar is restarted. As most of our settings for various adjustments had been wiped out, Sean then reset up the radar to the preferences we’d had before.

It is doubtful that we will notice any major changes in the operation of the radar. However, as this is one of the most important pieces of nav gear aboard, we like knowing that it is completely up-to-date.