[pct-l] Yuppie 911

[Eric Lee]

I wrote:
>
So yeah, it's not surprising that long-range sailors generally
have the training and intelligence to use their beacons responsibly.
>

I found a Wikipedia article on distress beacons that includes a link to an
interesting report on distress beacons and SAR:
http://www.icao.int/icaoimojwg/meetings/jwg14/docs/JWG_SAR14wp13.pdf

This report discusses worldwide data for the year 2006 on 406 MHz beacons
which include EPIRB (marine), ELT (aviation), and registered PLB devices.
The data does *not* include statistics for the new mass-market devices like
the Spot which do not use the 406 MHz band but instead use other, less
reliable technologies.

There were approximately 495,000 406 MHz beacons in use worldwide in 2006.
Of those, 2.7% of them were used to send a false alert.  Of all beacon
alerts that were sent to SAR, 97.1% of them turned out to be false alerts.
There were 3,378 false alerts from EPIRBs, 2,730 from ELTs, and 110 from
PLBs.  That's astounding to me.  Remember, this is mostly for marine and
aviation beacons where the users tend to be highly-trained and competent and
does not include data from mass-market devices.

I haven't seen any numbers for mass-market PLB devices yet but anecdotal
evidence suggests that the numbers will probably be bad.  The rate at which
alerts turn out to be false can't get much worse than it already is but the
sheer volume of beacons generating false alerts can certainly get a lot
worse.  It'll be interesting to see how this shapes up.

Eric