Which reminds me of a phone call I once made to Brixham CG to ask for a forecast. It contained the words "becoming cyclonic". I asked what that meant. Got the reply "It means the daft buggers dunner what way it's gunner blow from."
To address your original question, the standard way of checking your transmitter is to transmit to another station and just ask "radio check". However, I would suggest DO NOT CALL THE COASTGUARD FOR A RADIO CHECK ON CHANNEL 16. If you do, the coastguard will courteously respond, but consider 2 things:
Firstly, the coastguard has better things to do but, more importantly, it is making unneccessary use of ch 16. Here in the Solent I find it a constant irritation.
Make prior arrangement with another yacht on one of the ship to ship channels, or a Marina on their working channel.
Actually I have to disagree, Ch 16 is exactly the channel you need to call on, keep it short and sweet. It is possible that Ch16 is not working on your set but 80 is for instance.
Call once, it works, do not call everytime you put to sea, that is the reason Ch16 gets swamped apparently, although up here the coastguard probably relies on the odd call to keep him awake/forums/images/icons/smile.gif
If you are of the parandoid persuasion then get a hand held and get your crew to call you when they are in the dinghy etc.
Just a small point to those people new to the VHF, when you call a vessel give them adequate time to answer, there is one vessel in Tremadog Bay, every Sunday she calls her friend for a good old gossip I expect. Gives friend about 10 seconds to reply before trying again. Don't know about you but my fixed set is at my nav station, if I am setting sails etc. it could take me 2 minutes or so to respond, this woman has called about 8 times by then.....arrrgh.
Got to say...glad I am not on the Solent when it comes to Radio watching!
Granted - but I always call our local coast radio station on it's hailing frequency, as they prefer to keep 16 for distress working, and wont answer ordinary traffic on 16.
I think that Cornishman is wrong when he says that Coastguard wuill SOON not have anybody monitoring Channel 16.
From talking to them, it seems that they will no longer have an operator with a headset doing nothing but listen to 16. This Guard Watch will be kept through a loudspeaker on a couple of desks used by operators doing thing like entering data onto the computer. They tell me that they have no plans to discontinue monitoring Channel 16 ------ as this remains the International Calling and Distress Channel, There is sense in this.
On this forum, there have been a number of people telling that their DSC safety traffic call to the Coastguard was ignored. I have also experienced this at Brixham, who immediately replied to a Ch 16/67 communication.
This is not to rubbish the DSC system, but to point out that it is - as yet - a long way from being perfect.