Now I can do long distance paddles without my wife worrying too much, she can now find me if I get stuck or injured, hopefully I never need to use it?

Emeboy said..
That looks pretty handy Dave and not too big.... How much?

$249 and came with an arm band pouch and strap also free registration every 2 years.

DaveSandan said..
Now I can do long distance paddles without my wife worrying too much, she can now find me if I get stuck or injured, hopefully I never need to use it?

No she can't. She can only find you if you're conscious and aware enough to press the button.

For wifey to find you you need a SPOT or Garmin InReach tracker. With the SPOT she can track you. The InReach lets her send you a text message telling you to pick up some milk on the way home.

Phone App Glympse will allow someone to follow your progress or see that you have made it safely to the pub.

^^ you can tell when there are three cop cars out the front, a helicopter overhead and the kids are playing in the boat

Quite a bit bulkier, but with a lot more features is the Standard Horizon HX870 VHF hand held radio: www.standardhorizon.com/indexVS.cfm?cmd=DisplayProducts&ProdCatID=85&encProdID=F074C5751E79473FCD911FF7D468A2E1&DivisionID=3&isArchived=0
On top of being a full featured and unusually powerful handheld VHF radio, it still has the one button touch to send out an emergency signal with your GPS location, name, craft, and inland emergency call numbers. It also allows you to talk to rescuers or other paddlers and boaters over VHF, allows discrete calling to other MSCI registered radios instead of open channel hailing, it is waterproof and also floats with a water activated strobe light that turns on to help you find it. It has a nice feature where you can send, or request, GPS locations to other VHF radios which will happen automatically without anyone needing to answer, and this one will display the compass course direction and distance to the other person's location. All this for about the same price as the PLB. My wife and I carry these on all of our downwinders on Maui.
As a cautionary tale, a husband and wife who are experienced paddlers were doing a Maliko run a few weeks back. She forgot to put on her leash and lost her board. He realized that she was missing and had no idea where she was. He paddled a mile back to land, and borrowed a cell phone to call emergency personnel while having no idea where she is. Meanwhile she is trying to swim in from a mile out in very rough seas with no flotation and no communication. Luckily she ran across some divers who helped her swim in until they flagged down the lifeguard on a jet ski. Very experienced paddlers, but how many things are wrong with this picture that were probably saved by the luck of the divers being there. Think of how many ways they could have used the HX870 to solve this situation. They could have called each other, he could have gotten an automatic location fix on her with course heading and distance even if she was not able to operate the radio, either one of them could have hit the emergency button and gotten a return call from the coast guard so that they could describe the situation, and the lifeguards would have her GPS location so that they could get straight to her on the jet ski.

I believe that you can change the setting for the light feature to different flash patterns, or just turn it off all together if you prefer. I leave mine on, since having the light flash inside my safety kit is not visible and does not use much power. That way if I need to pull it out of my pack in an emergency, the light is working both for finding the phone if I drop it, and for making me more visible to searchers
.
Here are a few links explaining more about DSC (Digital Selective Calling) on newer marine VHF radios.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_selective_calling
www.boatus.org/marine-communications/
www.jamestowndistributors.com/userportal/how_tos.do;jsessionid=C559E205361BE43E70E67E1F1A0918CF.ajp13w1

The KTI PBL comes with a reflective mirror in the case, I will also be using the same PBL for my Bushwalking and if I go to NZ to do the same I will carry it with me so no matter where I am I have the one devise, KISS principle!!

Tardy said..
Great kit.

what about a hip flask .
port

I will keep that in the dry bag on the board and use my Camelbak to keep it handy, it's usually Vodka, same colour as water, lol..

DavidJohn said..
There's a new type of laser/flare that would be better than a mirror for signing and the lip-stick size devise puts out a fan of laser beams so you don't need to be pin-point accurate when aiming it.

Sounds good!!