2020-8-16 The one about EPIRB basics

This week on Sundays With Sully we talk safety at sea, in particular EPIRBS and the different versions available. A great peace of mind for all boaters, check it out. Do you have any questions about this, drop it below in the comments.
All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Sundays with Sully. We have another field trip today. We are with Dan from Life Raft Services. We're going to be talking about Marine safety, in particular EPIRBS, personal EPIRBS, and some of the highlights of difference between cat ones cat twos, your personal EPIRBS, battery life, service maintenance, and all those kind of things. Let's talk about EPIRBS. Everybody kind of knows what they are, hopefully, but Dan can give us a quick overview. We'll go from there. So we've got EPIRBS are really the full size beacons you're looking at. And then PLBs are the are the smaller ones, personal locator beacons. So the full size EPIRBS and actually PLBs are basically working off of government satellites, world wide network of search and rescue satellites and these are are designed to to contact emergency rescue services if, if something goes wrong. They're really meant as a as like a last ditch panic button. So the full size EPIRBS, these are these are intended to be installed on a vessel and stay there. The smaller ones, you can you can bring with you on the water. So so the full size EPIRBS, they're going to live on your vessel. You're going to register them to your vessel and they're going to stay there. The bigger size, obviously bigger battery in there, longer transmission time once you turn it on. With with either of the full size EPIRBS, you're looking at usually at least 48 hours of continual transmission. The smaller units are about 24 hours. So obviously there's, there's a couple of different types of the full size EPIRBS here. They're broken up into two categories. You got category one, which you have over here. You're always going to see that in a in some type of white housing always mounted on the outside of the boat, usually on a hard top, on a roof somewhere that if the boat sinks, this has a clear path to float to the surface of the water. So that's called a category one. And it's got a hydrostatic release on it. That's going to work off a water pressure. So as the boat sinking, if you can't get to this, as the water pressure increases on this anywhere between 1 to 4 meters, this is going to pop free float to the top and now it's automatically water activated to come on board, come online and start sending signal. Category two. This is a different model EPIRB, but if we were looking at the same model, the EPIRB itself looks exactly the same between category one and category two. We're just talking about the bracket that it's mounted in. And so a Category two EPIRB is also commonly called a manual bracket or a manual release. So this type of EPIRB, you actually have to physically remove the EPIRB from the bracket before you can activate it. After it's out of the bracket, it's going to behave exactly the same way as a Category one. Even if you throw this in the water, it's going to automatically turn on. But again, you have to physically take it out of the bracket to make it happen. And we kind of want to also mention if you have one of these in your ditch bag, make sure you keep it in the bracket. Sometimes the ditch bag might get a little moisture in there that's going to give a false on for that. It's going to start transmitting. Coast Guard's going to show up at your boat. So keep it in the bracket. Save those guys so they can be out there doing the real search and rescue. And that actually brings up a really good point about registering these beacons. Whether you have an EPIRB or a PLB, it is required to register the beacon with NOAA in the US. That's absolutely free. It doesn't cost you anything. But what that does is that registers your name, a phone number, some emergency contact. So if you are washing off your boat and set this thing off and you don't hear your phone ringing, then somebody at home, somebody else that you gave another contact phone number, they're going to call. They're going to try calling those phone numbers first to see if it's an actual emergency before they send the helicopters and the and the Coast Guard. So super important to register these things. And again, it's completely free. It's just you just got to do it. And then so that's going to be our big purpose, our mainstream ones. Now, there's a new line out there and that's the PLB style EPIRB. Why don't you kind of walk us through the differences. You know, why you would maybe go with one of these versus one of the bigger ones? So maybe you don't have your own boat, maybe you've got a couple of different boats. You hopping back and forth between maybe you're going skiing or or hiking in the wintertime and you want to bring this thing with you.

[@alpaire]

For the small device you told that it's used also during hiking, skiing etc. everywhere and is not activated by the water, so how can we activate it in case of distress?

[@navtronicsmarinegroup]

Great question it has a manual activation that you do on the device itself. Usually it has a hard cover over this so you cant accidentally set it off