I've got a radio & it would be nice to learn all about it,is there a video on youtube?
boat use without a vhf license?
- Thread starter symondo
- Start date
jerrytug
N/A
ShinyShoe
Well-Known Member
AFAIK the full system does provide that, but our Class D stations are not trusted with it
Pete
It is, although im not sure how that looks to the operator on modern kit. It used to be a manual process... so just like on a Class D you had to initiate a new call. In my mind you'd wait the requiset 5 minutes and the acknowledge button flips to Relay. I know its fraught with problems Ship A is in distress and in range of Ship B and coast station X Ship B is in range of A and coast station Y but not X. "A" transmits a distress but B doesn't hear the response from X, so relays it. Y then has to identify the detail and see if its the same message X is already working. Multiply that up to 50 ships and 6 CG stations and it becomes a mess... I suspect time it right in just the right place then you could bounce the message across the globe. That might be exactly what you want if you are in distress mid-atlantic but not if you in the solent. It'd need calls to have a unique ID (i suppose they do by combining the timestamp and MMSI) that was then recorded centrally for the whole world to avoid Solent suddenly getting calls from Adelaide to say do you know there is a boat sinking in port solent!
The concept of it being manual is that the Class A operators can use their intelligence to realise they are on the extreme's of receipt relative to the original incident location and coast station and can deal with that accordingly...
There is a bluetooth technology now available to allow mobile phones to communicate in a sort of crowd sourced operator independant network of phones that almost does this. It was developed in 2013, DSC was developed in 1990's. A 160 character text message on their phone seemed to meet most people's needs in 2000 - I don't ever remember anyone saying I wish I could take a picture of that and send it to someone or I'm not sure how I'll survive if I can't face time... I suspect if you were re-writing the DSC code today you could do a lot more sophisticated "stuff"
chanelyacht
Well-Known Member
In practice, I've never known the "manual" process to take more than a minute or so at the very most. Experienced operators know instinctively the lines of their patch (most match with exact degree / minute lines) and can take the decision without actually plotting. DSC distress also automatically appears on our AIS system (even if the cas doesn't have AIS).
We get people hitting the button 10 minutes into an existing job, because they don't understand the process.
ShinyShoe
Well-Known Member
Which brings us back to why people need to go on the course.
However there is an interesting point about the process and channel stuff...
Distress Vessel Presses Red Button. Distress "Text" is sent on CH70. If the user goes to 16 to make their voice call rather than waiting for an ACK then it is transmitting on 16 when the ACK comes through and it can't listen on 70 when transmitting. That means the person listening misses it and the person transmitting the voice message misses it too... So their set will re-send it automatically... ...someone on another vessel out of voice range (or badly squelched!) sees a series of DSC alerts coming through and thinks the CG have missed it...
chanelyacht
Well-Known Member
Ch70 is news to some people, especially the ones we tell to shut up whilst chatting on it...
