EPIRB Decoding

[epirb]

Hi folks,

Newbie to the forum, been using PDW for years and years! I am part of a volunteer sea rescue group. Long story short, when an EPIRB is activated it is (eventually - when a satellite passes) sent to a Rescue Co-ordination Centre, then to the Water Police and finally to the Sea Rescue Group. Depending on the satellite pass, it can take from 15 minutes to over 2 hours to receive the EPIRB information which, of course, can be critical if you are in the water!

As the data is (I believe) BPSK 400 baud, sent approx every 50 seconds at 5 watts on one of a handful of frequencies between 406.0 MHz and 406.1 MHz from the EPIRB, is it possible to tweak PDW to receive and decode the EPIRB data and display / email / ftp / sound alerts etc ? If we can receive the data directly (contains EPIRB identifier and most now incorporate a gps so it sends the exact position of the EPIRB) we can hopefully save a life.

In the last few weeks we have had several activations, one which took 1.5 hrs from activation to phone call from police to sea rescue, and another that took 1 hour to do the same (had a loss of life - tragically ).

Anyway, it is a long shot, but thought I would put it out there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this request.

[Discriminator]

As the data is (I believe) BPSK 400 baud, sent approx every 50 seconds at 5 watts on one of a handful of frequencies between 406.0 MHz and 406.1 MHz from the EPIRB, is it possible to tweak PDW to receive and decode the EPIRB data and display / email / ftp / sound alerts etc ? If we can receive the data directly (contains EPIRB identifier and most now incorporate a gps so it sends the exact position of the EPIRB) we can hopefully save a life.

There is already software available - EpirbPlotter. Would this fulfill your requirements? You can try it for free for 21 days. After that, you can register it for a reasonable fee.

-Rene

[epirb]

Hi,
I have tried it. It only accepts soundcard input, I found it doesn't always decode correctly (could be the soundcard / discriminator setup), but at least I can get it to alert me using blat to email me. Pretty clunky to look at (I want it to display on a large monitor in the operations centre - PDW looks good!) and my experience with PDW over the years makes me very confident in it (admittedly I still use version 2.16 for the HTML upload!).
I have ordered a DVT-B dongle and will experiment with RTLSDR to see if I get a better result, but would prefer to use a slicer or something more reliable.
Thanks for the reply.

[epirb]

Thanks anyway folks. I guess it's back to the drawing board!!