98025 GMDSS False Alarms

GMDSS False Alarms
Report No. 98025

It is only a matter of time before a GMDSS ship is involved in a collision due to the OOW being tied up in the communications section of the bridge answering continuous, superfluous alarms. From experience, these always happen in busy waters. A typical example was one of 59 minutes of continuous false/relay alarms at night in bad weather in the middle of a large fishing fleet in the Taiwan Straits. It required the Master to be called to the bridge solely to deal with alarms whilst the OOW carried out his navigational and collision avoidance duties.

I do not think that the authorities appreciate the amount of traffic that is generated. Recent ships that I have sailed on have not bothered to send in those distress/error messages that are not relevant with their GMDSS log books. I believe that all messages should be included so that the MCA are fully aware of the volume of correspondence produced. This could then be used as evidence to the IMO committees that there are still problems with DSC.

The journal "Fairplay Solutions" reported on the fifth GMDSS conference held in Plymouth in 1997, saying that the biggest cause of concern was the digital selective calling system and the number of false alerts which it generated. Captain Nicholas Cooper told delegates, "I am not here to pat you on the back and to tell you all what a great job you have done in making DSC available world-wide, but to bring to your attention some of its shortcomings". He went on to say "I make no apologies if I shock or offend some of you because you are the ones who forced this almost totally unworkable system onto us in the first place". He gave several examples of false alerts, one of which involved a fully loaded 200,000dwt bulk carrier north bound at night in the TSS in the Gulf of Suez, with oil rigs, platforms and other vessels in the close proximity. The DSC alarm went off with another error message. This particular error message was bounced right round the world and repeated no less than 24 times by seven different DSC stations. The position given was 9,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean. "This was a very serious distraction to the safe navigation of the vessel", commented Cooper, "and again resulted in the main power breakers being tripped to silence it".
The main thrust of Coopers argument was the poor design of equipment that had been produced to date. He blamed the manufacturers for making the equipment "overly complicated and user unfriendly" and said that one well known manufacturer's equipment was "a masterpiece of bad design which looked as though it had been thrown together in a hurry using buttons and switches chosen at random from the spare parts bin. The operations manual that accompanied it would be a joke if the issue at hand were not so serious".