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Who’s surprised
that the DSC (Digital Selective Calling) aspect of VHF marine radio has
gotten off to a slow start? Let’s review the technology and the major
impediments it’s faced since introduction in the late 1990’s.
First of all, even as the first pleasureboat radios able to send a one-button
distress signal with owner ID and location came to market, we all knew
that the U.S. Coast Guard might not be able to hear those calls for many
years. They still can’t. Then there’s the ongoing debacle known
as MariTEL.
As you may recall, perhaps
with a grimace, MariTEL promised to use the non-distress properties of
DSC to revolutionize the coastal ship-to-shore communications business.
We were going to be able to direct-dial private calls from up to 50 miles
offshore with our boat radio, even hook up to the Internet using the digital
modem that is at the hardware heart of DSC. MariTEL had bought up almost
all the existing U.S. coastal VHF commercial stations, won more frequencies
in FCC auctions, and partnered with several high-flying tech companies
to build out a multimillion-dollar network of fiber cable, tall towers,
and state-of-the-art digital gizmos. The company even hinted strongly
that it would soon provide the Coast Guard with its much needed communications
upgrade. I know the story all too well and also grimace in embarrassment
because I wrote with great enthusiasm about how MariTEL’s fantastic
new system would fuel our adoption of DSC.
Of course MariTEL’s
vaunted network turned out to be almost entirely smoke, mirrors, and hype.
The company crashed so badly that as of last summer it even shut down
all the old regular voice stations. (Today its main hope of revenue seems
to be to charge the Coast Guard and/or us boaters for use of the A.I.S.
frequency it controls, an ugly story for another time.) MariTEL’s
fall was due in part to the wild turnaround in its partners’ larger
tech businesses. The other part was the way so many of us stopped using
ship-to-shore VHF in favor of our cellphones, and therein lies a lesson.
The very first person
who bought a cellphone could call anyone who had a regular old landline.
Picture the early adopter who installed the first DSC-VHF, hooked it up
to his GPS, acquired an MMSI identification number, and figured out how
to enter it into his radio’s now-more-complicated menu system. He
got diddly for his efforts. The Coast Guard wasn’t listening; MariTEL
wasn’t listening. If you log on to www.maritelusa.com today, you’ll
find this terse message: “Note: Standard Horizon radio purchasers,
the free, one-year MariTEL service offer has been discontinued.”
The damn service never existed anyway! In the words of Homer Simpson,
“Doh!” Why bother with DSC when it’s like a Zen paradox,
the sound of one hand clapping?
But it’s Standard
Horizon that I credit with the inventiveness and determination to show
us how—despite these problems—DSC could make boating better.
Besides being one of the first to build a “MariTEL Ready” VHF
(doh!), the company took a lead in designing recreational radios with
useful commercial-grade DSC features like a directory of friends’
names and MMSIs (i.e. speed dialing), position send and request, and call
waiting—useful, that is, if you had friends within VHF range who
also had DSC radios onboard. But Standard Horizon persevered, developing
the first pleasureboat radios that could output the NMEA DSC caller position
string and the first plotters that could read it.
I admired this innovation
the first time I saw it at a boat show, but last fall Standard arranged
for me to do some striper fishing off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to really
see how well it all works. Once two or more boats have each other’s
MMSIs programmed—which is a one-time job that’s fairly quick
with the unit’s twist-and-push-to-enter knob—several neat communications
tricks are possible. You can turn to a little-used channel, pick your
friend’s name off the directory, and his radio (and his alone) will
ring and switch over to that channel (where your actual conversation is
not private, but then again no one heard you going there). It’s just
as easy to ask for your buddy’s lat/lon position, and that’s
when the plotter magic begins. His position immediately snaps up on the
electronic chart, and a dialog box asks if you’d like to navigate
to him (see photos on page 52). Bada bing! Electronics just reduced several
minutes of radio chatter, scribbling, and pain-in-the-rear manual plotting
to a couple of button pushes. And the position passed is totally private,
encoded in a DSC signal that can only be decoded by your radio.
Next page >
Part
2: Sport fishermen around the country are getting into DSC. > Page 1, 2,
3, 4, 5,
6, 7
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