VHF requirements
VHF requirements
Saturday, 24 December 2016
There are two paperwork requirements for on-board VHF - the radio agency of the country of registry of the vessel will issue a Ship’s Radio Licence which identifies each particular item on board any particular vessel, and the user must hold an VHF Operator’s certificate from some authorised source showing his competence to use VHF on inland vessels in general.
For a UK registered vessel you can apply online to Ofcom (www.ofcom.org.uk) for a Ship’s Radio Licence, detailing each piece of equipment used on board (including handheld). You will be issued a Callsign and MMSI ((Maritime Mobile Service Identity) number. Each VHF appliance you have must be set up with ATIS (Automatic Transmission Identifier System) which requires entry of your MMSI number preceded by the country code - in the case of the UK this is 9 as under. For vessels registered in countries other than the UK you follow a similar process with the radio authority of that country.
All vessels should keep a copy of the RAINWAT agreement on board (Regional Arrangement Concerning the Radiotelephone Service on Inland Waterways)1. Annex 1 para 4 (page 16) details the Procedure for ships visiting the Inland Waterways covered by the provision of the regional arrangement:
• The usage of ATIS is mandatory
• For visiting vessels the ATIS code shall be generated by complementing the MMSI and adding the figure "9" as the very first digit.
(For example, if the MMSI is 111222333, the ATIS code will be 9111222333)
In addition to this Ship’s Licence which relates the equipment to your specific vessel at least one person on board will require a personal VHF Operator’s Certificate allowing him to use VHF equipment generally - other crew members may use the VHF under his authority. If you have an operator’s certificate issued by one of the countries signed up to RAINWAT it will be generally accepted, but not necessarily otherwise. Certificates held by aircraft pilots are not accepted. Note that the UK is not a signatory, but the UK Short Range Certificate is mostly accepted despite the fact that it does not cover inland waterway procedures. However some countries e.g Belgium will only accept a UK certificate for use on a UK registered vessel.
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At CEVNI 4.05.2 it is mandatory for a vessel ≥20m under way to have two VHF sets permanently in ready-to-transmit and ready-to-receive state, one tuned to ship-to-ship channels (normally channel 10) and the other to nautical information channels (e.g. an adjacent lock or a particular waterway).
Sign B.11b is an obligation to call on the allocated channel.
Sign E23 simply identifies the VHF channel in local use but does not make it obligatory to call.
Some local regulations impose variants on this, and e.g. Belgium requires all vessels 7m to <20m to carry at least 1 VHF, and France has similar requirement on the Seine in Paris. In France and the Netherlands the user does not require an operator’s certificate for using a hand-held unit.
Unfortunately a lot of leisure boaters choose to ignore VHF requirements, which does get plaisanciers in general a bad name among the professional skippers, and unfortunately too this group does tend to be mostly UK and other non-EU owners. The regs make it mandatory for craft >20m, but I personally feel it would be better if it applied at perhaps 15m - there have been numerous occasions where it would have been simpler/safer/better if it had been possible to speak to a pleasure boater by VHF. There is an underlying assumption that small craft are nippy and can easily dodge out of the way; although probably true of a grp cruiser it is not so likely with most barge-style craft.
Having said all that, obviously if you spend all your time on the leisure canals such as the Midi where the bulk of traffic is small craft and hire boats you are not going to get much practice, and owners of large craft there do get very lazy about using VHF at all. We often hear people say that there is no point in having their VHF on as they don’t speak French, but that does rather miss the point. In the Netherlands this is even less valid an excuse as most other people you meet can speak English. You’re not going to get involved in some deep philosophical conversion on your VHF - the number of useful phrases is quite few and I’ll get to that.
Many owners of small craft say they use a phone to contact lock keepers, but this also misses the point. As you approach the lock you will hear various skippers calling and giving information on their presence - the phone-user does not get to hear any of this, but conversely nor do the other skippers know of his existence.
A telephone is a relatively private communication. But in the boating environment we are a group, and it is very important that we know what other members of the group in our vicinity are doing. Should you have the misfortune to break down on a large waterway at least you can call passing vessels on VHF - you’ve no way of knowing the skipper’s phone number. Also there are still a lot of places where it is not possible to get a phone signal.
The use of AIS (Automatic Identification System) will shortly be mandatory for craft ≥20m and already many craft do now use it. This enables them to see and identify other craft in the vicinity on a screen, and includes information on their size, speed and direction. Craft which do not have AIS are therefore already disadvantaged by their lack of awareness, and if they don’t use VHF either they are effectively travelling blind.
1 RAINWAT is the "Regional Arrangement Concerning the Radiotelephone Service on Inland Waterways". It is an agreement to implement common principles and rules for the safe carriage of people and goods on Inland Waterways. The signatory countries are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Serbia, the Slovak Republic and Switzerland.
link to Tam’s RYA Book of CEVNI Regulations and DVD Barge Handling in France
(All text and photographs copyright © Tam & Di Murrell unless otherwise credited)