Fishing gear used in coastal fishing should be equipped with fishing buoys, indicating their locations, thus enabling their constant monitoring and detection by other ships to avoid collision. However, common fishing buoys fabricated using Styrofoam, bamboo, or PVC have short detection ranges owing to their weak radar radio wave reflection. Although research on improving the performance of radar equipment is in progress, studies on early detection of fishing gear to reduce collisions with ships sailing nearby are limited. In this study, we conducted experiments to determine methods to prevent collisions between ships and fishing gear by improving both the fishing buoy material and installation method for the reflector to increase the radar detection range of the fishing buoys.

Radar is an indispensible equipment in all vessels under way. In Korea there are many fishing net buoys near the coast, which causes an enormous threat to safe navigation because it is very difficult to detect the buoys by radar due to their small radar cross section. In this study RTE(Radar Target Enhancer) was installed on the fishing net buoy and its echo was analysed carefully. The results showed the possibility of wide detection of targets, especially small targets such as fishing net buoys, navigation buoys and etc.