As I was preparing a lunch to take to work this morning, the UPS truck backed up the driveway. I met the delivery person at the door, who said "More Boy Toys" as she handed me a box. I looked at the box, which was from E&B Marine, and asked "How can you tell?" She was already half way back to her truck and just shrugged. Later I asked Marty to explain it, and she said: "Anything from a marine supply store must be a Boy Toy". So it is deduction and not intuition. Well in this case it was true, and the box contained my VHF marine radio. I opened the box which was over half full of Styrofoam packing material around a smaller box. Inside that smaller box was mostly a solid chunk of Styrofoam with slots cut in it for a few little pieces of rubber, plastic, and black anodized aluminum. The rubber (antenna) screwed into the top, the plastic (battery) snapped on the bottom and back of the aluminum (radio). The result is the smallest, cutest, hand held radio I have ever seen. The body is about the size of the smallest cellular phones, but it has a serious looking "rubber ducky" flexible antenna attached on top. It also has two big knobs sticking out next to the antenna, completing the illusion that it is a real hand held radio that has been shrunk to half size (and one sixteenth volume)!
Sea Kayaker Magazine had an article about marine radios last year which recommended them as an important piece of emergency equipment. They can be used to call for help to the coast guard, to listen to the weather channels, to talk to other boats, and even to make telephone calls. Why get one of these instead of a cellular phone? One reason is the clever way the FCC set up the emergency channel. This channel (16) is also the channel you are supposed to use to initiate all other calls. This means every boat on the ocean has its radio tuned to listen to channel 16 in the hopes that one of their good buddies will try to call them on it. (Then you agree on a channel to have a conversation on and get off the emergency channel). The result is that every boat on the ocean is a potential relay station for emergency calls to the Coast Guard. Most of the places I would really like to go kayaking are rather remote, and that means the cellular phone base stations are few and far between. Both MCI and AT&T have marine telephone stations on Point Reyes, so most places in the water around home would be line-of-sight to a phone call to tell Marty to stop worrying.
I have been shopping for one of these radios for quite some time. The Sea Kayaker Magazine article claimed that the price on marine radios was dropping to the point where you could get a low power hand held model for a little over $100. So I was horrified to find them in the marine supply stores for over $400. I got myself on the mailing list of a few marine discount stores, and waited for the catalogs to come in. Eventually, one of these companies advertised a radio for $129. But they also offered a large number of other radios with a wide variety of options, including models that were actually guaranteed to be waterproof to 1 meter. Models with push button scrolling channel selectors, knobs, or thumb-wheels. Controls that could or could not be operated through a waterproof bag while wearing neoprene gloves. I got overloaded with choices and could not decide, so I put the catalogs aside for a while.
I saw a trade article in a free kayaking newsletter from the kayak store in Santa Rosa. It was really an ad from ICOM claiming that their hand-held radios were designed with the kayaker in mind. I called them up and asked them to refer me to a local store that carried them. I figured that the only way I could decide what radio I wanted was to go to a marine supply store and hold them in my hands. Aside from giving me some phone numbers in Oakland and San Francisco, the ICOM representative mentioned that I would be interested in the IC-M1 for kayaking, which was not mentioned in the trade article. She said that it was a "cute little thing" the size of a cellular phone. I looked back in the discount catalogs and found that this model was in there, but the pictures had been scaled up until they looked the same size as all the other radios. If they showed this thing in someone's hand for scale, it might sell better!
I called up all the marine supply stores in the bay area, and they were either all out or didn't keep models in stock. They would be happy to order one for me, but I might as well just use the discount catalogs. By then I had come to a decision: Even though it was not the cheepest, I would buy the ICOM M-1 model because it was small, had push-button controls, and was waterproof. I would put it in a clear vinyl bag anyway just to be doubly waterproof and to add some flotation.
This radio finally arrived on Wednesday. It was smaller (and denser) than I imagined. The rubber antenna screws itself waterproof tight to the body. The body is made from two solid pieces of aluminum clamped together around a rubber gasket with screws you can see. The battery has its own pressure seal around the gold plated contacts. The back of the radio is solid aluminum because it is also the heat sink for the power transistors. The manual warns that it can get hot enough to burn if you transmit at 5 Watts continuously! The receiver is the best weather radio I have ever used. It can pick up the weather channel from inside my car while driving down the freeway. I can hear the traffic on San Francisco Bay while I'm driving across the Richmond Bridge. This is how I'm going to safely visit Alcatraz Island! By listening to the Coast Guard traffic synopsis (every 15 minutes) I'll know when the water is safe for crossing. I now have ears that can listen around corners on the bay. Even though my boat is only 3 meters long, I now have a voice that can shout, if I need to, at 5 Watts like the biggest boat in the Bay!
But before you can legally push the PTT (Push To Transmit) button on your radio, you have to get a Mobile Radio Station License from the FCC. This is not a big deal, but the forms are amusing. I am supposed to fill in the class of boat I will be "installing" the radio in. Am I a tanker, freighter, or passenger liner? Apparently the form was new enough that the fine print mentioned the possibility of a PORTABLE radio, and said I could skip all those boxes if I sent them a note confirming that I would be using the transmitter on various US ships. The Sea Kayaker article mentioned that this FCC license would cost around $150, but when I called the FCC they told me only $75. It wouldn't have surprised me to find that the cost of the equipment had fallen below the regulatory fees that used to be an insignificant fraction of the price of operating a radio. The form says that I can operate my radio for 90 days on a temporary permit after I have mailed in the check to them. But even baring that I can listen to the marine channels and the weather reports all I want.