Interrogation of DSC radio for position

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petery

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I glanced through the lastest Raymarine advert leaflet and they talked about their latest radio having a facility to respond to interrogation via the DSC channel and provide the boats position to the station doing the interrogation.

I assume it's not AIS as I believe that the info is transmitted continually by each ship that's equipped with it.

Have I got the wrong end of the stick - or is this something new?

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Never heard of it before. If correct I would assume that the function could be disabled, it would be useful at times (ie. stolen boat/monitoring of a casualty position etc.), but a bit of an invasion of privacy at others.

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I would be surprised if there were any DSC VHF's available in the UK that did not activate in response to a Position Request Call. It provides the position of a specific vessel called (id by its MMSI), response is voluntary, it is not something new of Raytheons, and it is not AIS.

If interested as to how it works go to any manufacturer's internet site who has their manuals on their site eg Icom, and download a manual of a DSC VHF. It, of course, only works for the transmitting station if the called radio has a GPS connected to the VHF.

John
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Before someone goes to the bother of pointing it out "Raytheon" was, of course, meant to be Raymarine in my previous post - I have been around a while!

John

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Looked long and hard in the manual for my Simrad RD68 DSC radio and in the specs for a couple of other radios with Class D controllers and could find no reference to the facility.

A US Coastguard site mentioned the facility - but that's all.

Coldn't find a relevant ICOM site ... could you let me have a URL?


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No problem. Try looking at the manuals for the IC-M602 and the IC-M502 on the non UK Icom sites, both are Icom radios I am familiar with and which describe the function (the M602 one decribes it quite well).

Icom Japan (Icom's Home) is http://www.icomuk.co.uk

Icom America is <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.icomamerica.com>http://www.icomamerica.com</A>

There are a number of others in other countries, but outside the EU they all list the same radios.

I am not familiar with the UK Icom radios as they are totally irrelevant to the rest of the world, but interestingly I had a look at the Icom IC-M601 manual which is the UK version of the M602 that the rest of the non EU world uses. There is no reference to Position Request in it, even though its international brother the M602 does. Even more intriguingly if you look at the pdf file it seems that the Position Request content of it has been edited out at some stage (for example if you do a search on "Position Request" it takes you to menu items on drawings of the radio's display but on which the "Position Request" words have been made invisible - examples of that exist on pages 22, 44 and 45 of the manual). I assume that happened during the attempts (which I get the impression was pretty rocky) to get the M601 accepted in UK and if so is perhaps an example why the rest of the non EU world's VHF manufacturers have been disinterested in the UK market.

It would seem to me that this functionality might be one of the things that UK VHF users are forbidden to have but the rest of the world is not, or which has proven to be too complex to implement for the UK for some reason - I would be very interested if anyone can confirm that.

John

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