Top Honours at 2009 NMEA Awards 08 October 2009

Manufacturer of the Year - Support: For the fourth straight year, Furuno received the prestigious award. In fact, Furuno has secured this award every year the category has been included on the ballot. The award clearly illustrates what an important role customer service plays within Furuno and with a technical marine electronics dealer network.

Best Radar: NavNet 3D's extreme popularity was evident by winning NMEA Awards in the two major categories Best Radar and Best Navigation. Furuno took top honours in the Best Radar Category for the thirty-fourth consecutive year with the NavNet 3D DRS Ultra Hi-Definition Radar Series. The NavNet 3D DRS Radars come in a variety of sizes, from the 2.2 kW, 19-inch Radome to the powerful 25 kW, 6 ft. Open Array. Each sensor incorporates Furuno's UHD Digital Radar processing for the ultimate in target detection and performance.

Best Navigation Category, Furuno took home the NMEA award for the NavNet 3D MFD12. This unit sports a high definition 12.1-inch Multi-Function Display that displays mm3d Vector charts. Enhanced by TimeZeroTM technology, this chart plotter has incredible redraw speed. With its native 3D architecture, you can display your charts in 3D or traditional 2D, while further enhancing the charts with satellite photography overlayed on the plotter.

Best Fish Finder: Furuno's popular FCV-585 received the Best Fish Finder award bringing Furuno's Best Fish Finder award total to an unprecedented 38 years in a row. The FCV-585 is a 600W/1kW digital Fish Finder that incorporates Furuno's award winning FDF (Furuno Digital Filter) technology.  FDF technology helps adjust gain, STC "clutter" and output power, as well as suppress main bang (the echoes just below the transducer.) It also makes the picture clearer and easier to decipher.

Marine Specialty Product: This category provides for nominations of special marine electronics niche products that do not fit within the other award categories. Because of the general nature of this category, it attracted a significantly high number of quality nominations and the committee assigned two awards in this category, one for the winner and one for the runner-up. Furuno's recently introduced SC30 Satellite Compass was recognized with a 2nd place award in the Marine Specialty Product Category.

Honourable Mention: Maretron, a leading developer and manufacturer of marine electronic networked instrumentation, received "runner up" or Honourable Mention for its free downloadable software, N2KBuilder^TM. The network editor is basically a CAD system for NMEA2000® and it will help create better designed and well documented networks for both new and retrofit boats.