This morning my radios when crazy when someone near me pushed the dreaded red button on their vhf.
Can rose point ecs or coastal explorer display the position of the vessel?
How about the friendly position request feature on some radios?
Both Coastal Explorer and Rose Point ECS will display symbols at positions received from a DSC radio over NMEA 0183 using the standard DSC and DSE sentences. These will appear as a red circle inscribed by an X for a distress call and a green circle for other positions. However, not all radios implement the protocol (or implement it correctly), so your milage may vary.
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But, what about a VHF connected to N2K and Coastal Explorer using NEMO gateway? Will we still see the red circle with X at the location of the distress vessel?
I have eliminated all vestiges of NMEA 0183 - never to return.
Only NMEA 0183 DSC and DSE sentences are supported at the moment. When this was implemented there were no NMEA 2000 radios to test with at all and we haven’t found a sample since. However, if you could send an Electronics.log file to support@rosepoint.com that contain an NMEA 2000 DSC message (PGN 129808), we can probably get support added pretty quickly. (This post explains how to get access the Electronics.log.)
Is there a brand of radio that this has been tested with?
It may be easier to replace one of my five on board VHFs than to try and troubleshoot this.
Also how can this be tested without asking a friend to push the red button?
I looked into 129808 and to sum it up, it’s a mess! There is an extensive thread on Panbo forum from 2015 discussing NMEA PGN 129808 without finding a solution to getting a VHF distress call to show up on a MFD. I can’t find anything more recent that solves this issue. My Icom M506 VHF manual says PGN 129808 is in the transmit list, however, in all the years I’ve had this radio connected to N2K (with a Garmin 7612 chart potter) I have never seen a distress call show up on the 7612 screen. During a summer season I always hear a few alarms so the opportunity was always there. I can only conclude that if a VHF distress, (red button) is activated nothing would show up so even if I was close to a distress vessel there is no way to quickly locate it and respond - short of copying a lat/ long if the distress vessel comes up on voice. Copying down a panicked coordinate is always error prone.
If I can’t get 129808 to show on a Garmin MFD I can’t expect Coastal Explorer to have it show up. Some manufacturers like Simrad have resorted to proprietary PGN’s that only work if all devices are theirs. A google search has not brought up any NMEA changes with 129808 since 2015 - am I missing something here?
https://mt.panbo.com/2015/04/direct-dsc-vhf-calls-to-ais-targets-a-nmea-2000-standard.html