Originally Posted by
JohnS
Pat,
As others have already mentioned you should be able to connect a hand held gps to your fixed mount dsc capable vhf and meet the requirements for the house radio. For the hand held vhf you are likely in the same situation as I am: need to spend $$ before January next year (provided the SSS adheres to the NCORC recs). What model of fixed mount vhf is on your boat?
My comment about the benefits of the gps enabled dsc radio call are more related to the rapid transmission of location. It can take a bit of time for an epirb or plb to get that information back to SAR, especially for the older, non-gps enabled beacons. (I believe the numbers are something on the order of as much as an hour or more for non-gps epirb's which rely on doppler shift measurements to determine a location. The gps enabled beacons should be able to send a location in minutes and perhaps on first transmit with those beacons that connect to an external gps to have a location pre-loaded.) The other advantages I can see in the vhf dsc call are that it goes to every dsc enabled radio in range (this has already been mentioned) and you are likely to be in communication with CG very quickly. We all know that the hand held vhf more than likely saved two lives when Heat Wave lost her keel. If the radio they had retrieved from the boat and used to call the CG had been dsc and gps enabled, their location would have been sent along with the distress call, which would have been a great aid to the SAR efforts. As it was the CG's ability to tell the Heat Wave crew to look for the pilot boat and the ability of Heat Wave to guide the pilot boat to their location. I tend to think of radios and beacons as complimentary devices and if I were to find myself in a situation like Heat Wave I am sure I would activate the beacon and get on the radio, look for my voo-doo doll and whatever else was at hand to help. So much for my 2 cents on the matter.