If you’re in the dark about DASS, the advanced Distress Alerting Satellite System designed to enhance the existing COSPAS-SARSAT system, this video should help bring home its value to sailors.
With the summer boating, flying and climbing season setting in, the Goddard Space Flight Center held a press conference on DASS today. The new system requires new satellites, and full implementation of this system is far into the future, somewhere around 2020. (Given the distant reality of DASS, the skeptic in me wonders if NASA’s tenuous budget was also impetus for the event.)
According to Dave Affens, NASA Search and Rescue Mission Manager, the DASS system, once implemented, will be capable of locating the source of a distress signal from a 406 MHz Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) that is not GPS-enabled just as quickly as it could locate one from a GPS-enabled EPIRB. That’s good news for boaters who are still holding onto their older 406 EPIRBs, but I imagine that by the time the new system is implemented, most of non-GPS units will be obsolete. Sadly, I don’t expect manufacturers of 2020 to provide any better support for older EPIRBs or to stop charging ridiculously high prices for required battery replacement. The good news is that we can expect prices for GPS-enabled EPIRBs to continue to come down.
For a discussion of EPIRB and Personal Locator Beacon priorities, see our April 2010 article.
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