Illegal HH DSC VHF for travelling skippers

[Ningaloo]

Here in Australia I think that the majority of plbs sold are for outback use and not marine so nothing to do with a ship radio license.
I use my own UK registered plb here when crewing on offshore races. As far as I recall this has its own unique MMSI, unlike the Epirb on my (UK) boat. If it trigged I'd expect local SAR to get more details from UK registration authorities.

 

[IanR]

Thank you for the interest, clearly this is another bureaucratic impasse created by those who theoretically had our best interests once at heart.

The reality is that you would buy a hh VHF use it without DSC most of the time and then in an emergency use whatever you had to to get yourself rescued.
The civil servants have run out of energy necessary to solve the problem and cover themselves with the opportunity to arrest the poor user to cover their omissions.

To my mind it is more evidence of the badly thought out implementation of DSC promised much but fails to deliver almost all.

So long as non DSC units are available......

 

[lw395]

VHF DSC is old tech.
The standard was designed to meet the needs of ship-to-ship comms sometime late last century.
It's not like mobile phones where we can just invent a new standard every few years and flog everyone on the system new hardware every four years.
It takes a very long time and a lot o feffort and money to get all the ITU countries to agree a new standard.
Handhelds are pretty much outside the original brief. Not really necessary for very many people, so no great point in updating the world standards, when in general comms have moved on somewhat from VHF DSC.

 

[Zing]

I'm no doubt breaking the rules, but it seems sensible to me to have the handheld with the same MMSI as the boat. That way if someone calls the boat an you are not by the radio, you can pick up the call from the pub or from the foredeck. Also if the boat is burning down and you are on deck you can press the red button and they get a meaningful bit of extra information about you.

 

[Spirit (of Glenans)]

I'd think the liferaft would be considered as part, or an extension, of the yacht that just came from.
Just sounds just common sense to me.

Yes, the French call it "l'annexe"!

 

[Spirit (of Glenans)]

I have bee sailing for 20 years, and have held a VHF Licence for ten. In all that time I have never received or sent a DSC message, nor have I ever heard of anyone else doing so.

 

[noelex]

I have bee sailing for 20 years, and have held a VHF Licence for ten. In all that time I have never received or sent a DSC message, nor have I ever heard of anyone else doing so.

DSC is not used much, but I would check your radio settings. There are a few “all station” DSC messages sent by coastguard etc and you should be receiving at least an occasional message. Some of these are text messages. They are often stored by the radio and usually indicated by a small “envelope” icon on the display.