DSC Is it Working?

[philfin]

Heard an interesting comment from a search and rescue professional yesterday, who said that they estimate something in the region of 85% of recieved DSC distress messages turn out to not being actual distress situations. A big part of the them being sent in error. It is causing the services a lot of frustration and so much so that they are considering advocating the doing away with the DSC all together.

Has anyone heard similar reports or have experience of the same. Any thoughts?

 

[Birdseye]

One of the problems with the early DSC sets was exactly that - false alarms triggered by accidentally pressing the red button. Thats why the early sets had their approval withdrawn and you can now only get sets with a little plastic flap over the button and a 5 sec countdown. From what I hear there are now very few false maydays on dsc and most of those are malicious ie from stolen sets.

The DSC system is an IMO system - there is no way that the coastguard would be allowed to ignore it even if they wanted. And the RNLI are of course tasked by the coastguard so its not their decision.

Your "professional" may well be referring to the stats on the lower frequency epirb.