Last article we talked about life-rafts and several of you had some great ideas on sharing the cost among the people you regularly fish with.
Lets talk about E.P.I.R.B.S, which stands for Emergency Positioning Indicating Radio Beacon. An EPIRB is my second choice for communications equipment, my VHF radio being the first choice. These devices have come full circle from the “old” types that transmitted a distress signal on an aircraft and military warning signal. The major problem with this system was there was a high incidence of false alarms and there were big gaps in coverage. The old system basically picked up the signal and retransmitted it (called bent pipe) transmission. Although at the time it was state of the art, it could take up to six hours for rescue units to obtain a fix.
Today state of the art is the 406 MHz EPIRB. Dedicated SAR/SAT satellites listen and store the signal until they are over a ground station making worldwide coverage possible. The precision of this device is 1nm instead of 11nm, which results in faster rescue response. The average time to notification with the 406 MHz EPIRB is 46 minutes. What I think is most important is that when you purchase the 406 MHz EPIRB is that it comes with a registration card that you fill out and send to NOAA. It contains specific information about you, your vessel and emergency contact phone numbers for rescuers. You must fill out and send that registration card in for the system to work to your advantage.
Even better yet are the GPS/EPIRBs. Although a little more expensive, the GPS/EPIRB reduce the notification time to a little as four minutes and it also provides a search area of only 1 nautical mile. A common misconception about this type of EPIRB is that it “pinpoints” your position. Because of the “electronic sentence” that your EPIRB sends to the satellite and is not long enough to accurately fix your position with today’s 12 channel GPS receivers. Another misconception is that your GPS/EPIRB constantly upda