U.S. COAST GUARDThe Rescue 21 system is running in 12 of the Coast Guard's 35 sectors.
The service plans to install it for the remaining 79,525 miles of shoreline and waterways by the end of 2011.
The full cost, when the system is completed in 2017, will total about $1.1 billion, Coast Guard officials say.
The Coast Guard says it hasn't tried to estimate how much the new system would save the service – either in time or money – because the calculation would be unusually complex, and might not be very accurate.
Since each rescue effort is different, it's difficult to add up how much time the service would save in a particular incident, says Lt. Commander Brian Anderson, project officer for Rescue 21 at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington. "It would take a significant amount of research," he says.
Moreover, the new system's vastly improved listening capability already is enabling the Coast Guard to pick up distress calls that it otherwise might have missed entirely – which leads to more time spent on rescues, though with significant benefits to those who are in distress, Anderson says.
NEW FEATURES
Besides direction-finding equipment, new Rescue 21 installations contain extra-sensitive VHF-FM and ultra-high-frequency radio transceivers; chartplotter-style graphic-interface units; recording equipment that can tape and play back distress calls while filtering out background noise; and special devices that can patch a vessel's radios into shoreside telephones, enabling boaters to get direct medical advice.
By contrast, the old installations had no direction-finding capability, were riddled with gaps in coverage and were unable to deal with more than one radio call at a time. Coast Guard watchstanders had to make rough guesses about a boater's whereabouts. And the system wasn't fully compatible with equipment used by other first-responders, such as marine police or private rescue boats.
Rescue 21 corrects all these flaws, officials say, and also enhances the clarity of distress calls, allows even the small local rescue-stations to monitor more than one channel at once, and extends the range at which Coast Guard radio operators can transmit and receive voice messages.
DETERMINING LOCATION
The speed with which Rescue 21 can locate boaters in distress is stunning. If a boater merely keys the microphone on his VHF-FM radio for a second or more, the system can draw a straight line from a nearby communications tower to the radio antenna of the vessel in distress, narrowing the area along which rescuers need to search. A signal from a second tower – or efforts by a skilled Rescue 21 watchstander who can manipulate the software – can provide an intersecting line, enabling the Coast Guard to find the boat's exact longitude and latitude.
