New Beacons, New Radios
What Your Emergency Gear Can Do Now That It Couldn’t Five Years Ago
The Lummi Island rescue covered earlier in this issue was made possible by a Garmin inReach. The family activated the SOS, and Iridium satellites carried the signal to the Garmin Response center, where a 24/7 emergency response coordinator confirmed the situation and contacted Sector Puget Sound. The watchstander then got Sta Bellingham and an MH-65 out of Port Angeles moving. Without that signal — and without the active subscription that made it work — the day might have ended very differently.
The story is a useful reminder that emergency communication gear has changed a lot in the last few years. As Vessel Examiners and anyone in a RBS role, we still see plenty of older equipment in the field — radios manufactured in the 1990s, beacons whose owners have never registered them. Both may work. Both will alert someone. But the newer generation of devices does things their predecessors simply cannot, and the differences matter.
A New Feature on a Few PLBs: AIS
A traditional 406 MHz PLB sends its distress alert up to the Cospas-Sarsat satellite network, which routes it through NOAA to a Coast Guard or Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. The satellite alert is fast and global, but it has a long-recognized limitation: position updates come through slowly, often a fresh fix only every several minutes, and accurate to about 100 meters. The 121.5 MHz homing signal helps a searching aircraft narrow it down, but only once the searcher is nearly overhead. Anyone who has worked a SAR case knows what that means in practice — a 100-meter position circle, drift, and a head in the water is a hard target to find.
A handful of new PLBs — currently just two models on the market — also transmit an AIS man-overboard signal on VHF marine frequencies. Every AIS-equipped vessel within VHF range — every ferry, every tug, every commercial fishing vessel, the responding Coast Guard boat, and the MH-65 overhead — sees the survivor’s position appear on its chart plotter as a flashing MOB icon, updating continuously. The Sta Bellingham 45-footer drives directly to the icon. The MH-65 from Port Angeles knows exactly where to hover. In cold Pacific Northwest water where hypothermia is measured in tens of minutes, the on-scene phase is where minutes matter most.
As of mid-2026, the only AIS-capable PLBs available are the Ocean Signal rescueME PLB3 (sold in Europe and the rest of the world) and the ACR ResQLink AIS PLB-450 (sold in the Americas). They are essentially the same device under two brand names, both from the same parent company, and they first reached US customers in early 2023. Any PLB more than about three years old does not have AIS — the technology simply was not on the market yet. Some current-generation PLBs also include Return Link Service, which lights an indicator on the beacon when Cospas-Sarsat has confirmed receipt and location of the signal. A PLB purchased before 2023 has none of these features.
A current-generation PLB is roughly the size of a smartphone, weighs a few ounces, requires no subscription, and clips directly to a PFD. For a paddler venturing offshore — Bellingham Bay to the San Juans, the outer coast, anywhere out of cell range — a registered PLB on the PFD is a one-time investment that puts a 406 MHz satellite alert and an AIS man-overboard signal (on the AIS-capable models) into the smallest, lightest emergency kit available.
Handheld VHF Radios with DSC and Built-in GPS
Fixed-mount VHF radios sold in the U.S. since 1999 have included Digital Selective Calling — the red distress button that sends a digital mayday on Channel 70 with the boat’s MMSI and (when connected to GPS) its exact position. Handheld radios took longer to catch up. For years, most handhelds were either DSC-only (requiring an external GPS connection) or GPS-only without DSC. The current generation has both built into a single waterproof, floating handheld, and the marketplace is healthy — many of the popular marine electronics manufacturers offer handheld models with integrated DSC and GPS, with current prices ranging from roughly $150 to $350. A handheld VHF clipped to a kayaker’s PFD or a sailor’s jacket can now transmit a one-button digital distress alert with position — no separate GPS connection required. The Coast Guard’s Rescue 21 system, which covers all of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, sees the boat’s MMSI, owner, vessel description, and emergency contacts the moment the call hits the watchstander’s screen. A handheld VHF purchased before about 2018 is unlikely to have both DSC and built-in GPS.
A note for paddlers. A handheld VHF with built-in DSC and GPS is a small, relatively inexpensive piece of equipment — about the size of a TV remote, often under $250 — that fits cleanly in a PFD pocket. As your VEs and PEs already preach, anything not on the paddler’s person is part of the kayak, not the paddler, when the two separate. With the radio in a PFD pocket, a kayaker has Channel 16 voice for routine traffic and a one-button digital distress alert with their exact position when something goes wrong. In cold Pacific Northwest water where help is measured in minutes, a watchstander knowing exactly where the paddler is at the moment they push the button is a meaningful upgrade over a whistle and a phone in a Ziploc bag.
The MMSI Registration Question — and a Complication for Boaters in Our Area
All of the above is less effective without a programmed and registered MMSI, and registration is where many boaters fall short. The MMSI is a unique nine-digit identifier — the boat’s “phone number” for DSC and AIS — and the type a boater needs depends on the radio and where the boat goes. But the more important point is what registration actually does on the receiving end.
Imagine a Sector Puget Sound watchstander getting a distress alert at 0200 on a winter night. With unregistered or out-of-date data, the screen shows a position and an identifier. That’s it. With current and accurate registration, the same alert pulls up the vessel’s name, type, length, hull color, owner’s name and phone number, and emergency contacts — all of it on screen the moment the call hits. The MH-65 launching from Port Angeles knows it’s looking for a 28-foot blue trawler with the name Salish on the transom, not “a boat in distress somewhere in the strait.” The watchstander can call the owner’s emergency contact while the boat crew is still putting on dry suits, finding out whether anyone is missing, what the float plan was, what the weather forecast looked like at departure. Every piece of that information shaves minutes off the search and makes the right rescue more likely.
This works across all three systems, because they cross-reference — but only if the boater has properly registered them. The same MMSI goes into the fixed VHF and the AIS together, and if the boater has registered that MMSI with BoatUS, the U.S. Power Squadrons, or the FCC, both devices transmit a unified identity that pulls up the same vessel data on a watchstander’s screen. A 406 MHz PLB or EPIRB is registered separately with NOAA at beaconregistration.noaa.gov, but the NOAA registration form asks for the MMSI of the vessel the beacon is associated with — so a properly registered beacon and a properly registered MMSI cross-reference each other in the SAR databases, and a watchstander who pulls up the beacon’s hex ID can also see the linked vessel’s information. One coherent registration up front, kept current as contact information changes, produces useful data on every channel a rescuer might receive an alert on. A boater who has done the work right has a unified emergency identity that survives whether the alert comes via DSC, AIS, or 406 MHz satellite.
The opposite is also true. An MMSI that has been programmed into the radio but never actually registered with anyone, or a beacon never registered with NOAA, gives the watchstander nothing — just a number and a position. A registration done correctly years ago but never updated is sometimes worse: the watchstander calls the phone number on file and reaches a person who sold the boat in 2019 and has no idea why the Coast Guard is calling them. Registration done right, kept current, is the difference between rescuers having a fighting chance and rescuers starting from nothing.
This is the real reason the MMSI question matters. The legal requirements are secondary; the practical reason to get registration right — and to keep it current — is that it makes a successful rescue dramatically more likely.
Three Situations, Three Answers
Fixed-mount radio, U.S. waters only. For a vessel that stays in U.S. waters and never visits foreign ports, the MMSI can come free from organizations like BoatUS or the U.S. Power Squadrons, both of which are FCC-authorized to assign domestic-use MMSIs. That works for the majority of recreational boaters nationally — but not for many Alert 11 readers, because the moment a Bellingham boat crosses into the Gulf Islands or anywhere in Canadian waters, the requirement changes.
Vessel that visits foreign ports. Per FCC rules and international treaty, a U.S.-flagged vessel that visits a foreign port (Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas, etc.) requires a full FCC Ship Station License, and at least one person aboard needs a Restricted Radiotelephone Operator Permit. The Ship Station License produces an internationally-recognized MMSI registered in the ITU database, which means Canadian SAR authorities (or any country’s) can pull up the vessel’s information when the DSC distress call comes in. A domestic MMSI is in the U.S. database only — useful for the U.S. Coast Guard, invisible to a Canadian rescue coordinator.
Handheld radio that travels with a person. For a handheld that travels with a person rather than living on a single boat — a paddler’s PFD radio, a sailor who races on different boats, a charter customer, or any handheld that goes into a dinghy as easily as the family cruiser — there is a separate MMSI category specifically for portable handhelds. These are nine-digit numbers beginning with “8” rather than the vessel format. The leading “8” tells SAR authorities that the alert is coming from a handheld with limited transmit power and battery life, which directly informs how they plan the response. Handheld-specific MMSIs are issued by the FCC (through a portable Ship Station License application) and by Shine Micro, but not by BoatUS or the U.S. Power Squadrons.
The catch most people run into: most DSC radios will only allow an MMSI to be programmed once or twice. Switching from a domestic vessel MMSI to an FCC Ship Station MMSI, or from a vessel MMSI to a proper handheld MMSI, typically means sending the radio back to the manufacturer to be reset. The right MMSI for the way the radio will actually be used should be programmed in from the start — and the registration kept current as boats, contact information, and emergency contacts change over time. A perfectly registered MMSI from 2015 with an old phone number and a previous owner’s name on file is worse than no registration at all, because it points rescuers at the wrong person.
For Our Vessel Examiners and Program Visitors
When you talk to boaters this season, ask three questions: when did they last replace or upgrade their PLB or EPIRB? Does their handheld VHF have built-in DSC and GPS? And critically — when did they last update their registration, with NOAA for the beacon and with the appropriate authority for the MMSI? An old device is not a broken device. A 2015 PLB still alerts the Coast Guard. A 2015 handheld VHF still transmits voice on Channel 16. Boaters don’t need to throw out working gear. But when they do replace a battery, lose a device overboard, or upgrade their kit, they should know what current models offer that theirs do not, and they should make sure their registration data is current.
The Lummi Island family did the boring, unglamorous things right: PFDs, satellite communicator with a current subscription, float plan, conditions briefing before they launched. That’s the difference between a SAR case and a tragedy.
The Coast Guard and Coast Guard Auxiliary do not endorse or recommend any specific manufacturer or product. Boaters should research their options and choose equipment that fits their needs and budget.
Sources: U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center; NOAA SARSAT; FCC; BoatUS MMSI program; manufacturer specifications; Coast Guard Foundation.