Koden equipment: supply, installation and service in Busan

NAVION supplies, installs and services Koden marine electronics on fishing vessels and commercial ships calling at Busan. To be exact about status: NAVION holds dealer appointments for Marport (worldwide), TimeZero (Asia) and Olex (Asia and Russia). Koden is a different arrangement — we source the equipment and spares, carry out installation and commissioning, and repair units already in service. That is stated plainly here because owners deserve to know who they are dealing with before the invoice, not after.

The Koden range we meet on these vessels covers X-band marine radar, dual-frequency colour echosounders, scanning and searchlight sonar, GPS and DGPS navigators, chart plotters and combined plotter/sounder displays, and net sondes for trawl and purse-seine gear. Most of it sits on small and mid-size fishing vessels, usually on a bridge shared with equipment from three or four other manufacturers.

A new installation is largely mechanical and cabling work: scanner platform and mast bracket, cable runs and glands, supply and earthing, display position at the console, transducer location and fairing. Commissioning is where the set starts to earn its keep — heading alignment and radar timing, tuning, sea and rain clutter defaults, sounder frequency, gain and TVG, keel or draft offset, sonar hull-unit stroke limits, and a check that depth and position read the same on every display that uses them.

Repair work runs from magnetron replacement with a performance check afterwards, through scanner motor, encoder and cable faults, to transducer replacement, which normally needs the vessel in dock or a suitable in-hull arrangement. Before ordering anything we try to separate a display fault from a scanner, transducer or cable fault. On an older set the run between the mast and the bridge is a frequent culprit, and a new display fitted to a bad cable solves nothing.

Integration is the other half of the job. A Koden sounder or GPS rarely works alone: position, heading and depth move over NMEA 0183 to plotters, autopilots, AIS and to TimeZero or Olex on the same bridge. We check sentence formats, baud rates, talker IDs and grounding rather than assume two units will agree simply because both are labelled NMEA.

Parts are ordered through Busan. Send the model and serial number from the rating plate, plus a photo of the unit and its connector, and we come back with what can be supplied and what carries a lead time — that distinction decides whether the job is finished alongside or carried to the next port. Our base is on Yeongdo; engineers work at Gamcheon fishing port, the Yeongdo repair yards and Busan New Port, and travel to other yards on request. Service is in Russian, English and Korean.