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A quick note on EPIRB's A friend of mine was recently separated from his boat and spent 5 hours in the water waiting to be picked up (for some reason the skipper thought it would be good to wait 3 hours after they went missing to alert the coast guard!!) because the EPIRB failed to send a signal. He has a small held unit. The ariel is part of the necklace which holds it on, so I understand, and this was submerged in the water and unable to send a distress signal. He was later spotted by the search plane which directed the lifeboat to him. Later that week him and his buddy went to see the crew of the plane to thank them and were told that the satellite needs to receive the signal 4-5 times to register it as a genuine distress call otherwise it ignores it, as it did in this case. The moral of the story is make sure you hold the thing out of the water to ensure the signal is received by the satellite to register a distress call. Regards Richard -----Original Message----- From: David Reinhard [mailto:reinhard@oc*.co*.au*] Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 3:53 AM To: techdiver@aquanaut.com Subject: EPIRBs Hi Guys, thanks to all the people who responded to my questions about EPIRBs. I received a lot of useful information. In general comments were that there are significant problems with the housings for these units flooding. Also the small hand held units may not be "powerful" enough to be 100% reliable. It sounds like what we really need is a 406MHz unit which is small and comes with a very reliable housing. I will put the idea on hold for now, and maybe a suitable unit will become available sometime in the future. By the way it is incidents such as the one reported in the "Incident in Key Largo" thread that made me curious about the concept of divers carrying EPIRBS. From the sound of the article this was a dive operation that was usually well run. The operators that I dive with are very good and have a great safety record. But I occasionally take trips to places like Fiji and Vanuatu, and while one tries to get info on how good the dive operators are before going it is not always possible. So sometimes you take a chance and hope that they turn out to be reliable (haven't run in to any problems yet). thanks again, Dave. "KEY LARGO -- A California couple who went scuba diving in Key Largo saw more marine life than they bargained for: Their chartered dive boat inadvertently abandoned them, leaving the two stranded in the water overnight, six miles from shore......." -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'. -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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