Using Nautilus Lifelines in a dive club situation

[lloyd_borrett]

G'day,

Some members of a dive club I'm a member of, like me, already have Nautilus Lifelines and more are planning to get them. However, being safety consious, the dive club is also getting five Nautilus Lifelines to share between club boats and club divers on our club dive days. We typically dive from the private boats of club members.

But just how would you suggest we setup and use these five club devices?

It's not appropriate to assign the units to any one club dive boat as on any given day the units may be in use from a different dive boat with the nominated dive boat not out on the water. Plus the units could be used when doing shore dives as well.

It would be impractical to assign a vessel MMSI number to each of the units based on which dive boats they get used from on each club dive day. Besides, I don't think this is possible. My understanding is that the Nautlus Lifeline software only lets us set the MMSI number once, and after that it can only be changed with the special intervention of Nautilus. Is this correct?

Perhaps we should just leave the MMSI numbers of these five units set to the default 000000 setting. But will that work?

My reading of the documentation leads me to think that the emergency DSC mode of a Nautilus Lifeline won't work until the unit is registered with Nautilus. But once that's done, the unit's emergency mode will work, even though the MMSI number isn't set. Have I go that right?

Are you aware of any other dive clubs with a pool of floating Nautilus Lifelines? If so, how are they using them?

How would you suggest this dive club use them?


Best regards, Lloyd Borrett.

 

[oerentals]

My thoughts, as we just started renting these, so are in a similiar situation regarding floating units -

The MMSI number is a unique identifier for the radio itself, not a particular person, boat, etc. Therefore go ahead and obtain an MMSI for each radio, using the following info (as per the Nautilus instructions):

Visit: MMSI Registration for VHF/DSC
Boat Type: XXX-Unspecified
Registration or Documentation #: None
Home Port: Area where you are most likely to be diving
Capacity: 1 (or more if you regularly dive with someone)
Radio Installation Type: Portable VHF/DSC/GPS
Remarks: This is a portable VHF for Scuba Diving and not associated with a particular boat. It will be used in [these] areas.

*You will be able to login and update the registration at any point to include current locations should they change periodically.


Then just let any member/boat use any radio. The distress signal will work just fine. In the remarks section I would indicate that these are club radios, shared among many members/boats (in our remarks, we indicate it is a rental unit and may be used in various places for various uses)

Hopefully Nautilus themselves can correct me if I am drastically wrong on my suggestions!