Personal rescue beacons A buyers’ guide

There’s a wide choice of personal rescue beacons, but which should you buy? Ben Meakins reports

It can be nigh impossible to locate (let alone recover) a person who has fallen overboard, but technology is coming to your aid with the proliferation of PLBs (personal locator beacons) in recent years. There’s also been an increase in other products which use AIS to show your location to the vessel from which you’ve just fallen. PLBs and EPIRBs (emergency position indicating radio beacons) are, on the face of it, the same thing. They work in exactly the same way, by sending a coded message on the 406 MHz distress frequency which is relayed via the Cospas-Sarsat global satellite system to the relevant maritime rescue co-ordination centre – that’s Falmouth Coastguard in the UK. The beacon can be located to within 5NM from its initial transmission, but will then transmit…

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Practical Boat Owner (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2015

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