We have just returned from a great 3 week cruise of the San Juan islands and
the Canadian Gulf.

This gave us an opportunity to test our new Standard Horizon handheld
back-up VHF radio with built-in GPS (HX 850S).

The unit comes with a DCS test function, which enabled us to "ping" the CG's
"RESCUE 21" network in the Pacific Northwest waters... and it worked like a
charm everywhere in the San Juans and even as far north as Bedwell Harbor on
Pender Island in the Canadian Gulf.

Within seconds of transmitting our data, including GPS location and MMSI
number etc., the RESCUE 21 center in Seattle sent an automatic
acknowledgement . Consequently our confidence that the CG would pick up and
locate an emergency transmission (say from our dinghy after ditching) from
the handheld VHF is now pretty high. We would of course still depend on our
main VHF radio as the primary radio onboard...

The HX 8509S also picked up all WX stations as well as VTS traffic on
channels 5/11/14 as well as channel 16 with minimal static and distortion
thanks to a very effective SQL filter.

So that was all good news for such an inexpensive and impressive handheld
unit.

However, we also tried to contact several AIS equipped vessels that were in
our vicinity - and none of them responded to our DCS position requests or
calls to their MMSI numbers. I don't think that is any fault or limitation
of the Horizon Standard VHF radio (since all our RESCUE 21 tests were
successful) but perhaps rather an indication that these vessels were not
monitoring incoming DCS calls.

So it would seem that the "tried and true" method of hailing vessels using
channel 16 (with their name from the AIS receiver) is still the best, rather
than wasting time finding/programming their MMSI number in the VHF and not
getting any response anyway :-(

Just my 2 cents worth...