These are just pretty darned cool. The Standard-Horizon HX471S and HX600S submersible 5-watt marine VHF radios with DSC appear to be two of the best emergency VHF radios around at the moment. The HX471S is shown at left, and the HX600S is on the right below.

Aboard your boat, each sits in its charging cradle, which has NMEA connectors to receive position data from a GPS or chartplotter. If you have to leave your boat in a hurry, grab the radio and go; it should be fully charged, and will already have your most recent GPS coordinates stored in it. When you push and hold the “Distress” button, the radio will transmit a preformatted digital distress signal, complete with your vessel’s MMSI number and your last known location data.

“Hold on!”, I imagine you thinking. “Why don’t these radios just have onboard GPS receivers to provide updated realtime position data over DSC? What’s the problem?” Good question, and I’m glad you asked. (In my imagination, I mean.)

Apparently, packing a GPS receiver and a VHF transceiver into a single small enclosure isn’t an easy engineering problem to solve. If you want to keep up with the progress in this area, check in with Panbo from time to time. He discussed some Standard-Horizon models recently, and he gave us a heads-up about some new handheld VHF/GPS/DSC models on the way from other manufacturers.

The HX600S carries an MSRP of $333, and the HX471S, which sports a metal body and can also transmit and receive on the FRS frequencies, carries an MSRP of $417.