DSC Radios, Saltwater Sportsman article Options

[JohnsCarolina]

The June issue of Saltwater Sportsman magazine published an article in the electronics section about making phone calls through the DSC system. From what I could gather from the article, if your vessel is equipped with a DSC radio you could actually call another vessel using that vessel's MIMSI number input into your radio. So you put in the other vessel's MIMSI number into your radio and when you call them their phone actually rings and you can either authorize the call or not. You can also input another vessels MIMSI number and do a GPS polling and actually locate the exact position of that vessel. I can see where this would be helpful if you were buddy fishing offshore and wanted to talk to another boat and didnt want everyone to hear the conversation. Does anyone know how this system works? I have an ICOM DSC radio on my boat but cant figure out how to input numbers to call other vessels and so forth. I have raymarine c70's on my boat which are connected to the ICOM radio to send a GPS signal to the radio. I thought this was very interesting and can see how it would be very useful offshore when fishing. The article even mentioned that most anglers arent taking advantage of this system... thanks john

[Sea-Ya]

I going to figure out how to work mine one day.