The switch to digital television signals won’t just affect your TV, whether it happens February 17 or not. It’ll affect marine rescue beacons too.
According to a story in Oregon Live, the United States Coast Guard will stop monitoring the old 121 MHz radio frequency currently emitted by Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons, or EPIRBs, and switch to a 406 MHz frequency as of February 1.
That means if you’re a boater traveling more than 20 miles offshore, you better get your butt down to the local outdoors shop and shell out $500 or so for a newer beacon. Too much money? Well, you can take the chance, but the Coast Guard won’t bother to check the old frequency as of tomorrow, so that rogue wave is pretty much guaranteed to swallow you up and no one will ever know.
The good news is that the newer beacons “have better accuracy, fewer false alerts and greater reliability. Search and rescue agencies are able to respond quicker and pinpoint offshore boaters in trouble,” according to Boat US Foundation program manager David Carter, and they can detect your location within 100 meters if the signal is encoded with GPS coordinates.
Oh, and by the way, if you’re flying a plane or climbing a mountain anytime soon, you’ll need a newer beacon too.
via oregonlive
(Image Credit: szeke)
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