ELECTRONICS
Courtesy of Garmin
Garmin is praised for developing DSC-friendly chart plotters such
as this GPSMap 740. Other manufacturers are following suit.
minutes. “We had a situation on Puget Sound in Seattle in
January of this year,” Lockhart says. “A fellow was out on
a catamaran, and when he flipped it over, since it was
January, it was pretty cold. He hit the button and we came
literally over the top of him. We knew exactly where he
was, and we got there in a minimum amount of time.”
Lockhart notes that people in distress often give the
wrong GPS coordinates over voice radio, a mistake that
won’t happen with an automated DSC broadcast.
“We’ve seen a couple incidents of someone using voice
radio and they’re relaying a GPS position in lat/lon, but
they inadvertently relayed a waypoint instead of where
they are. After all, they’ve got a lot on their mind,”
Lockhart says, recalling a rescue in New Jersey waters
in November 2009. “[The victim’s] vessel was on fire.
He relayed a position, and that was it. Then they were
in the water. As it turns out, the direction-finding
capability was telling us he wasn’t there. He was
actually 10 miles from where he said he was.”
Federal authorities had hoped that widespread adoption
of DSC would enhance safety by freeing up Channel 16.
A secondary feature of DSC radios is the ability to hail
another DSC radio by its unique MMSI. Once the call is
acknowledged, the caller and the hailed boater switch to a
conventional VHF voice channel to talk. But, with so
few adopters, the effect on Channel 16 usage as a
hailing frequency has been nil, officials say. Another
secondary benefit of DSC is that fleets of boats—say,
fishermen or buddy boating cruisers—can track
members of their group on a chart plotter using a
DSC radio position-polling feature.
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EASE OF USE IS AN ISSUE
Eric Kunz is product development manager for Furuno
USA. Kunz says the percentage of boaters using DSC’s
hailing and polling features is low, even among the
minority that have an enabled and GPS-integrated DSC
radio. Kunz guesstimates that only one in 10 boaters with
VHF has ever used the non-distress features of DSC. He
describes the “user interface” on DSC radios—and, in fact,
the entire process of enabling a DSC radio—as “clunky.”
“When you take DSC and you try to explain it to
people and tell them how to set it up, and tell them that
they have to know an MMSI number to hail someone,
they just don’t give a hoot. They’d rather just text over to
their buddies. If they can’t do it on their cell phone, they
are just not that interested,” Kunz says. “Even professional
captains are now on their cell phones unless they’re out
of range. One thing we’ve learned with smartphones is
that if you have an app and it’s not super-easy to use, it’s
not going to get picked up.”
Chuck Hawley, vice president of product information for
West Marine stores, is also pessimistic about DSC. “It’s one
of those technologies that’s been around for more than a
decade, and, except for certain user groups, it doesn’t seem
like it’s widely embraced, even though it does solve a lot
of problems with a Mayday situation,” Hawley says. “The
issue with DSC is that you’re trying to do the complicated
task of setting up MMSIs in your little memory,
understanding a very arcane user interface, and doing this
on a device that doesn’t have a big graphic display.”
Cell phones, of course, are anathema to the maritime
rescue community, but one gets the sense that
opposing their use at sea is akin to shoveling sand
against the tide.
Todd Crocker is known in the marine industry as a
radio guy, having served in executive roles at both
Standard Horizon and Uniden. You might say he is the
voice of conventional wisdom on the issue of DSC
radio. “I think the problem is that we’ve got a society of
boaters now that have become very reliant on their cell
phones, and they look at it as the instrument to reach
out and get help when they get in an emergency
situation,” he says. “I think that is absolutely the worst
thing they can be thinking.”
MORE EDUCATION NEEDED, SOME SAY
Like many in the radio establishment, Crocker’s
first instinct is to blame DSC’s low adoption rate on
insufficient boater education, as if an ad campaign or an
article such as this one, or a series of articles, might bring
about a tipping point. Coast Guard officials and radio
policy-makers often say the same thing. So do the people
