Everything You Need To Know About AIS

If somebody goes into the water, is there anything that tells the boat they're in the water? Well, now there is a product, it's called an AIS emergency transponder. So now if you have an AIS system on board and most vessels do. That, emergency transponder can now talk to the boat. So now the boat has the gear and this can talk to it. As opposed to making something for the person and installing it on the boat. The land analogy would be, if you are on the side of the road, waving people down for help. That's an AIS. Calling aAA is like a personal locator beacon where you're waiting for an authority to come rescue you.

A lot of these AIS transponders are meant to be put into inflatable life jackets. So when they inflate, they mechanically activate. And if you're not wearing an inflatable there's products that you can put in a pocket, and if you have the wherewithal, when you fall overboard, you know, press a button or pull a lanyard, and this will activate again, going back to the vessels multifunctional display and activating their VHF radio with an audible alarm.

So you're going to want to put your equipment at the test mode, because if you set this off live, like we're doing now, every vessel in the area is going to get an indicator and their alarms could start going off. So you could anger a lot of people by setting this off. So putting your equipment in the test mode to see how it works with your instrumentation is important so you understand the relationship between an activating beacon and your equipment. Because when it really comes down to an emergency, when somebody really goes overboard, you got to act.

So we're going to inflate a life jacket with an emergency transponder already installed in it. Now it's supposed to go off mechanically because when you pull the cord, the life jacket inflates, the AIS is going to activate mechanically. If it doesn't, you should have the wherewithal of turning it on. You have to understand how it's going to work, should it not work. The unit is going to go off and antenna's going to pop up and it's going to start strobing a white light. If you don't see that white light, you got to know your product and you have to know to press the red man overboard button. So let's see what happens. We're going to pull on this. The unit is activating, and I know that because the white strobe is going off. Should something happen where it didn't activate the little red button, there is the activation button. So you want to see that now in order for this to transmit back to the boat, it needs to get a clear view of the sky. It's not going to do that inside. So we're going to take this outside and then a icon will appear on your chart plotter. Depending on the chart plotter depends on what icon typically it's a round circle with an X in it, but it'll show up as a symbol on your multifunctional display. 

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