Episode 44 LROCP AMSA MMSI ICOM M94DE

This jumble of letters and numbers can be explained by my decision to get a radio for my boat. To the uninitiated, the process is as complex as making sense of all these letters and numbers.

Let me start with the legalities. In Queensland, it is illegal to operate a VHF radio without a license. For safety reasons, however, the Water Police would rather see Moreton Bay filled with unlicensed boaties with VHF radios than unlicensed boaties without them. So, the law is rarely enforced. 

Apart from legalities, another good reason to get a license (properly, a Certificate of Proficiency) is to get a Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) code, which is free and is administered in Australia by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA). Your MMSI inducts you into the world of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Digital Selective Calling (DSC). When combined with your coordinates from a GPS-enabled device, the MMSI can be used to send distress messages with the push of a button. If there is one lesson I have learned about sailing, it is that things can go to custard very quicky, and they often do it all at the same time. The prospect of hitting a distress button, rather than going through the rigmarole of a Mayday call including knowing and relating your latitude and longitude when everything is going wrong all at once, is irresistible. 

In 2016, long before I knew much about MMSIs and GPS, I attended a day-course that qualified me for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) Long-Range Operator Certificate of Proficiency (LROCP). At the time, it was useful for my volunteering efforts with Sails at Bayside, as I could (legally) operate a VHF radio for the day’s activities.

The course taught me some useful fundamentals; for example VHF works (almost) on line-of-sight, thus limiting its range.  The course also taught me some other interesting, but less useful things; for example, methodologies to measure the specific gravity of sulfuric acid in a lead-acid battery using a hydrometer. I am sure this latter technique was widely used by U-Boats in WW2 but I cannot see myself drilling holes into the sealed batteries of today’s world to insert a free-floating hydrometer to find out what remaining charge they might hold. Also, what about lithium-iron-phosphate batteries? A colleague who volunteers with Marine Rescue told me that as radios are electrical devices, the course designers needed to include something of an electrical nature, hence the inclusion of WW2-era battery technology. Maybe it tells us something about the median age of the people who designed the course, but I digress.

I sold my previous VHF radio with Bolero, my previous boat, so I was in want of a radio and in need of a new one. I knew this day would come, but I had been putting if off trusting in the law that says electronic gear doubles in power and halves in price every 18 months or so.

My new boat, Sandpiper, did not have a radio. It did not even have batteries. I was hoping to find a hand-held self-powered unit that had GPS (for position) and AIS (for distress calls). The reputed quality of the brand was important. I settled on the ICOM M94DE. The fact that it had DSC was a bonus. It even had some rudimentary navigation capabilities in that it could point you to preset waypoints. Whitworths had one in stock that, at $499, was $6 cheaper than the best offer on-line, so I set about buying it.

Actually buying it involved some to-and-fro. Whitworths advised me to get an MMSI before buying the radio because you only get one opportunity to code in the MMSI. This might seem draconian, but it prevents the MMSI system, which is run out of Geneva, from getting clogged up with spurious MMSIs. It also discourages theft.

However, when I started my on-line application for an MMSI, it asked for the serial number of the radio. As I did not yet have the radio, I could not complete the application. I called AMSA who reassured me that there was no other reason for me to not get an MMSI, but it might take up to two weeks. I also called ICOM who reassured me that if I stuffed up the MMSI, I could send the unit back to the manufacturer to get the wrong MMSI erased. I then bought the radio from Whitworths and entered the serial number into my MMSI application. I was pleasantly surprised to find the MMSI in my email the following morning and, with my wife keeping careful watch over my shoulder, entered it into the radio, finally connecting all the dots, letters, and numbers.

Before taking it out, or even entering the MMSI, I had to charge the battery. In its first charge, the screen showed a “charging” icon, but gave no indication of progress. This might be because it had not been booted up, did not know its MMSI, did not know what a full charge looked like, etc. I simply left it for  a few hours and returned to a blank screen. Trying the "on" button, proved productive, as it actually turned on. Once set up, the screen showed how full the battery was (without the use of a hydrometer, I hasten to add), GPS position and, when I had typed it in, the MMSI. Incidentally, ICOM told me that I could have used the unit as a MMSI-less VHF radio by pressing the clear (CLR) button when it asked for one. The written instructions in the manual were obtuse on this important point.

On my first outing this week, I found that the radio worked as advertised, but it needed some adjustment.

As noted earlier, VHF works (almost) by line-of-sight. Because of this, I could not contact Volunteer Marine Rescue (VMR) Raby Bay from Manly Marina. There was some higher ground in-between. I had to get to the eastern side of Green Island to talk to VMR Raby Bay. It was reassuring to do a radio check, even though my transmission was weak. It is also worth remembering the line-of-sight nature of VHF when put the radio down, somewhere handy. Leaving the radio on a seat or on the floor lowers its visibility and limits its ability to receive. I found a useful function for the belt clip by clipping the radio onto the handle of the sliding companionway hatch, which was as high as I could get it without holding it up in the air. 

An alternative was to get a fixed radio with an aerial. However, there are no obvious out-of-the-way places to mount the aerial, and it would also need a house battery and full electrics, which the boat did not have. The cost of the fixed radio plus aerial would have been close to the cost of my hand-held radio, not counting the installation of the electrics.

Another issue was that I had not yet dialed in the collision alarm properly. The collision alarm goes off when another AIS-equipped vessel will enter the prescribed radius for closest point of approach (CPA) or time to CPA (TCPA). My alarm went off almost continuously, which was maddening. It went off in Manly Marina, likely because some of the moored boats had their AIS turned on. It went off whenever another boat was travelling parallel to mine, even though it was 1.5nm (about 2km) away). More than once, I wished I had my binoculars so that I could find the converging boat in an apparently empty bay. High on the list of priorities when I got home was to dial in a smaller radius for CPA, a smaller time for TCPA and something called Slow Warn, which is described in the manual with the same lack of clarity as the opportunities to code in the MMSI.

Overall, my VHF radio gives me confidence that it will do what it needs to do when everything else is turning turtle (it is worth mentioning at this point that the radio is waterproof, and it floats and flashes when dropped in the water). My next road test might be a Sunday-afternoon race. 

Radio clipped onto handle of companionway hatch cover