Thread: Dsc
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Old 07-09-2010, 12:02 PM   #4
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Re: Dsc

The radio has no position information on its own--- there is no built-in GPS. But it will broadcast the automatic emergency transmission on Ch. 70 if you push the red button even if there is no GPS connected to the radio. But the transmission will not contain any position data. It will include your vessel information assuming you've previously entered your MMSI number into the radio. You only get a couple of tries to do this, by the way-- if you screw up and don't enter it correctly the radio will lock up and will have to go back to Icom for resetting. This is a universal thing, not an Icom thing. Something to do with Homeland Security I was told.

We've not used the "locate your friend's boat" feature. I assume that you're saying it shows it on the radar screen? They only way it can do that is if the radar knows which way north is and most of them don't unless you buy the black box that tells it. We didn't--- the one for our Furuno is some $500---- so we don't have this capability. We aren't interested in knowing where anyone else's boat is, but feeding compass information to the radar would allow the C-Map charts in the unit to be overlayed onto the radar display. If you have a big enough screen this can be a useful feature, telling you that such and such a return is a nav buoy, not a boat, and so on. But the radar needs the compass information to do this.

We can accomplish somewhat the same thing by setting the plotter to display course up instead of the head up that we normally run. Then we split the screen with the radar and plotter and set the ranges more or less the same. That way we can at least make a comparison between the two displays and determine that such-and-such a return is probably a nav buoy or whatever. * Not as accurate as an actual overlay but it's cheaper

Sorry... went a bit astray from your radio question.
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