Another piece of safety equipment...

I have been asked a lot of questions about safety equipment on Serenity. One very important piece of that equipment is our EPIRB...Emergency Position Indicating Beacon. This unit will alert search and rescue services in the event of an emergency. Via satellite the EPIRB transmits a coded message to the closest rescue station on the 406MHz distress frequency. Our EPIRB also has  built in GPS which makes it possible to locate our position within 50 meters. Like other safety equipment an EPIRB is basically an insurance policy...you hope to never use it, but it is necessary to have it just in case. After extensive research I purchased the EPIRB from Landfall Navigation. As with everything else there are price differences that make a little searching worth the effort. The performance and features vary according to cost. Part of the difficulty is deciding exactly what features you will need, and which brand will give you those features at the best price. I chose an EPIRB with manual deployment which means there will be less chance of a false alarm because it is not activated by water. EPIRBs have to be registered. The differences between an EPIRB and a PLB...Personal Locator Beacon, are that the PLB is smaller and transmits the signal for less time...due to battery size I am sure. The PLB is registered to a person and the EPIRB to the vessel. If you are crewing on various boats the PLB would be a good option.