VHF HANDHELDS

A handheld VHF radio is one of the most important safety devices any boater can have, standing just behind wellmaintained life jackets.

Today’s handheld radios can save time searching for boating friends, ease communications in port, and keep you apprised of threatening weather conditions. Most important, in the case of an emergency, some can continuously broadcast an SOS complete with your GPS coordinates beginning at the touch of a button. Though some older radios still function without digital selective calling (DSC), this functionality is required by federal law on new fixed-mount radios, and a number of high-end handhelds now also have this feature. DSC has an important convenience in addition to its safety advantage of auto-hailing in an emergency. By using DSC technology along with a radio registered (at no cost) with the FCC via boatus.com and other sources, you can directly hail a single vessel via its maritime mobile service identity (MMSI) number, or hail a group of MMSI numbers programmed into the radio’s memory. All but one of the handhelds we tested has DSC capabilities.

HOW WE TESTED

How do these radios stack up? First, we could not test the radios’ SOS capabilities—that is illegal because it could initiate a search-and-rescue mission. We didn’t want US Coast Guard swimmers dropping out of choppers at our launch ramp. So, we have to trust the government agencies that regulate this element of VHF communication devices. We also didn’t test the DSC capabilities because the radios are permanently assigned to vessels and ours would be returned to the manufacturers.

TRANSMISSION CLARITY

We posted a team of experienced boaters on two vessels about 2 miles apart, each with two of the test radios. Each made a call at the highest output setting to the other, and we subjectively noted the clarity on each radio. Then we swapped radios to repeat.

Reception and transmission clarity were scored on a scale of 1 to 5.