T&T: AIS

[Dave Cooper]

G'day all, just installed the newly arrived CB200 AIS transponder. Arrived
at 2 PM and was up and transmitting at 3 PM. Not a bad "out of box
experience" for a change.

Its sensitivity is at least as good as the SR161/2 units as I've logged one
ship at 47.42 nm already which is the best that I'd ever gotten on the
SR161/2. We are using the same antenna and cables and connectors just so we
all know that our installation is clean ;-)

Confirmed our signal with several nearby ships already. First time any of
them have received a class B AIS signal!

So we need to work on the way it can transmit distress signals i.e. Mayday
with you name and position. Seems there is a lot more hidden in the lousy
manual about what it actually might be able to do both as a nav tool and
also as a safety device.

We have also seen a few more of the AIS signals transmitted from land
locations. We'll see if there are even more on our trip back down to
Venezuela as they are helpful "beacons" with a high degree of accuracy as to
their location.

It is interesting as once set up it just sits here xmitting our information
for others to use or not as they see fit. No user interaction (or
distraction) is required.

I expect you'll be able to get them with FCC approval sooooooooon. This one
is EC/EU stamped and was under $1200 landed with freight and duty with an
active GPS antenna.

As always YMMV........

Cheers

Dave & Nancy
Swan Song
Roughwater 58
Caribbean Cruise '07