Oh, NOW I get it. I admit I’ve been a bit inconsistent on this, if you re-read earlier writing about my radio. To set the record straight, I submitted the following question to Ask Raymarine:

"Is the Ray54 VHF DSC radio an NMEA ‘talker’, sending position info from received distress calls to a chartplotter, for instance?

Or is it only an NMEA ‘listener’, receiving GPS coordinates via NMEA in order to include them in DSC distress calls, for instance?"

Less than a day later, I got a response from Senior Support Engineer Chris Martin:

"It is just a listener, it will not plot on a chart plotter."

Oh! Well okay then. That’s a bit of a disappointment, actually. I’m not one of those Panbo propeller-heads who always buys the latest and greatest. I’m trying to get as much service as possible from my existing electronics.

But golly, it looks like I’m going to have to upgrade my VHF. Maybe not today, though, because my C-series chartplotter won’t do the basic things with DSC that I think it ought to.

Here’s what I want (are you listening, Raymarine?): I want my C-Series chartplotter to have a feature where I can click on any MMSI-identified target and initiate a DSC call; that’ll require a software upgrade to the chartplotter. It will also require a DSC VHF radio that can initiate the call as directed by the chartplotter, and of course it goes without saying that the radio should forward DSC messages to my C-series chartplotter for display on the map.

Oh, and since I’ve got a pretty small boat, my new full-featured DSC VHF radio shouldn’t be any larger than my Ray54!