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Step right up, folks, I have a holiday deal for you. VHF radios have never been priced so low and the models are more sophisticated than ever. You can get a basic radio for under $100. Or, for $300 more, you can get a radio with a GPS and chartplotter included. If you dig a little deeper into your pockets, you can have a VHF that allows you to see the position of a caller on the screen of the built-in chartplotter. Before you make any purchase, you should know some basic information about today's VHFs. As you've heard, there's a new gunslinger in town. He goes by the initials DSC, which is an acronym for Digital Selective Calling. Though he's been around for a few years, he's laid low until now. The law requires each radio designed after 1999 to have a hands-off system for sending a distress call. This is the foundation of DSC. Radios built before 1999 without DSC can still be sold. That's why fixed-mount units, such as Si-Tex's Mariner and Uniden's Solaris, now sell at discount prices—about $99. Even the Uniden Atlantis five-watt handheld goes for less than $100. If you're shopping for the best deal, it can make sense to buy directly from the manufacturer. Historically, only discount houses like Consumers Marine Electronics (www.consumers electronics.com) and West Marine (www.westmarine.com) offered off-list pricing. Today, companies like Uniden offer "like-new products through an online store. There were none available on the day I visited Uniden's marine equipment section, but there were some accessories, and some new products were listed in other categories.
If you're in search of a VHF that's really new, there's Uniden's MHS 350 submersible handheld with large display screen. This handy five-watt unit with weather alert and localized Special Area Message Encoding (SAME) weather reports sells for about $150 at discount Web sites. Discount outlets also offer deals on VHF radios engineered after 1999 with DSC technology. You can recognize a DSC radio, be it fixed-mount or handheld, by a small, spring-loaded cover that hides the activation button. This cover is usually bright red in color. Such sets are available in two different designs. There are less sophisticated units that use single receivers to handle radio traffic for both normal transmissions and DSC calls. These radios, like the Navman 7100 for $150 and Furuno's FM 3000 for $348, are designated SC 101 types. Radios that have two receivers—one for normal traffic and a second specifically assigned to Channel 70, the DSC channel—are advertised as Class D. These, like the ICOM 602 ($539) with hailer and scrambler, are more expensive. A 22-watt hailer and a foghorn are also included in the ICOM unit. As you move farther up the scale of VHFs, you enter the area of multifunction radios, which includes the ICOM 602. Here you get fixed-mount VHFs that are GPS capable. This means that a radio will accept position input from most any GPS that's plugged into it. The position data is then transmitted any time a DSC call is made. This, of course, is extremely important data to send during a distress situation. Wouldn't it be nice if the radio itself had an internal GPS? Enter the Uniden Mystic, a five-watt radio that's both a VHF handheld and a chartplotter/GPS. It sells below $400, and is the only handheld equipped with DSC.
Although it doesn't have DSC, Standard-Horizon's HX 471 is an amazing multifunction radio. It can provide AM/FM programming, monitor the conversations of airline pilots, and function as a Family Service Radio (FSR) for communications from ship to shore or within the malls. The HX 471 can be found for $335. Most fixed-mount VHFs don't have a GPS included. What they do have is a jack so a GPS, which serves other equipment like a chartplotter, can provide position information to the radio. This form of networking is now the most sophisticated technology available. Here you have a system that can include chartplotter, GPS, radar, fishfinder and VHF. Simrad's new SimNet is one such system. The network's GPS is used to supply position reports to the radio, which has Class D DSC, plus foghorn, hailer, scrambler and automatic phone number dialing. Raymarine has the 240 modular system with Class D DSC, and Furuno's FM 3000 can couple with its NavNet system to get GPS position data. Prices for these types of networking systems range from $3,500 to $12,500. This type of networking arrangement allows Simrad, Raymarine, Furuno and Standard-Horizon to link their DSC radios to their chartplotters so the location of incoming calls can be plotted on the network's chartplotter, provided it's also connected to a GPS. Even Garmin has engineered its GPS/chartplotters to accept DSC information from different brands of VHFs. Now you can know the location of a vessel in distress. Remember, with any DSC VHF it's very important to get a Marine Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number. This is the "telephone number that provides the ID of the incoming caller. BoatU.S. ( ©Motor Boating Magazine, December 2004 Other New Electronics featured this month:Electronics Archive
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