New toys… and a plea to other boaters to use VHF DSC

It was Saturday and we were packing and getting ready for our 10 day trip in Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands when suddenly FedEx rolls up and delivers this!!

Two days from the UK? Wow! Just in time so that I could have a project for the downtime on our trip. I really wanted to get the VHF connected to AIS and GPS so we have working DSC functions…  Well, I managed to get it all wired up preliminarily on our way to Sucia Island State Park and then finished the connections once we were anchored.  Works great and now the VHF has GPS position data so the DSC function can function properly.

After looking at NMEA multiplexers from Brookhouse, Actisense, and a few others, all of which were quite capable from what I could tell, I just wasn’t willing to drop $500 on those devices for the simple functions I needed..  Digital Yacht had recently announced the MUX100 and it was much more reasonably priced and did exactly what I needed it to do.  Our boat already has a Digital Yacht VHF/AIS Antenna splitter (SPL250, now replaced by the SPL2000) which seems to work fine so I decided to pull the trigger on this one.

I’m amazed to keep reading in magazines and online how boat owners have all the equipment on board to use DSC but never actually connect it up so it works.  Even our boat came with a DSC capable VHF radio (Icom IC-M422) and all other electronics with AIS, GPS, etc, but even though most of the equipment had been installed 4-8 years ago, the VHF was not connected to a GPS source so DSC was non-functional.

One day last week while we were heading down to Friday Harbor we heard the Coast Guard asking for all mariners to report if they’d heard a Mayday call at 8:30am..  It was a single Mayday call over the VHF with no information about the boat, position, identification, etc.  After most of the day of various boats radioing in their own position, antenna height, and whether they’d heard the call or not, the Coast Guard gave up the search since they didn’t have enough information to do anything.  I’d like to think that the call was an accidental call and no one was actually in distress..  But if their VHF had been set up properly for DSC, the Coast Guard as well as other nearby boats (who also properly set up their DSC VHF radios) might have automatically received their position and vessel identification automatically over the radio and been able to find them.

Anyway, if you haven’t connected the GPS to your DSC capable VHF radio, and obtained and programmed your MMSI number, DO IT..  It could save your life, or someone else’s!

For a high-level overview of what DSC does, check out this BoatUS page… http://www.boatus.com/mmsi/info.htm