Any chance what you have is not an EPIRB, but a SART? SARTs are only registered with beacon ID and doesn’t require programming. Shows up on radar and sometimes AIS also. No sat comms involved.

Cameroonian also works

Yes, except no plugging involved: It’s some sort of inductive way of programming it via a USB dongle. The info is written into this “programming program” which can read and write data to the unit, it’s written, and then you read it to make sure all the info was applied.

Then you label the unit physically with ship name, callsign, and MMSI. In addition to this there are two stickers that come with the unit, denoting the expiry date of the battery and the hydrostatic release. These go on the unit so that’s it easy to check if it’s time to replace them.

It’s been a while, but off the top of my head: MMSI (which is basically the radio installation identifier. Same number is used for AIS), and an ID digit (0 in wheelhouse, 1 on starboard bridge wing, 2 on port, etc)

For those who didn’t know: EPIRB = Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. Sends an emergency signal via satellite and terrestrial RF. They can be triggered manually, but they also trigger automatically if salt water shorts two exposed pads for a certain amount of time (a minute, I think).
Once triggered it will get a GPS fix and transmit a distress signal via satellite as well as terrestrial VHF. It is programmed with the MMSI of the ship it belongs to.
Works all over the world, although they take a bit longer to successfully transmit the signal in the polar regions as they then have to rely on LEO sattelots in polar orbits.

Source: I have a GOC, and I also used to work with marine electronics. I’ve programmed hundreds of these. Mainly Jordan Jotron TR60 (Ducking autocorrect). Some from McMurdo too, don’t remember the model name.

Fun fact: A coworker did have to make the phonecall of shame to the coastal radio after accidentally dropping one overboard.

I’m a 7.62x51 kind of guy

Don’t need, don’t own, kinda want (because I like shooting), but I can’t be arsed. Besides, I really should not pick up another expensive hobby. Plus I take firearm safety very seriously, and I don’t have a practical way of keeping it safe and secure.

I did something similar in the past where I’d mount the PCBs on a wooden board, using screws. But now I’m actually building something that requires the entire assembly to be relatively compact and lightweight so I’m printing a rig that can hold everything.

~10 minutes ago. 3min on chess.com. ELO 1100ish.

I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas. Whaa.

At the end of function calls

Now: 3+8. Chilling in my couch, considering whether I should add a beer to my lunch.

If work contacts me: 1. Because that’s what I’m going to have to sort out.

I used to do something similar when I was in maritime electronics servicing. It often involved dark and cramp spaces, and after bumping the headlamp in the bulkhead too many times I started wearing it around my neck instead. The light survived longer, and those few extra cm could be occupied by my head instead.

Probably around the same time I managed to find a used 386 for sale cheaply, and I bought it. I could play some of the early greats such as Dune 2, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, while others were playing CD ROM games such as Red Alert.

But I didn’t care because I was still having fun, and lack of too many distractions allowed me to dive deeply into the fundamentals. When they moved on to the next cool game, I taught myself turbo Pascal and played with the serial ports and an old AT modem.

A few years later I got myself a 166MHz (MMX!) and got properly online (IRC, ICQ, etc) along with the rest and they had a hard time understanding how I was immediately so much better at understanding “their” stuff from the start than they ever would be.

I still use a wallet when I’m travelling, as that’s the only time when I actually need cash. Plus it also holds my passport, seamans books, vaccine booklet, and misc other useful stuff.

When I’m home-ish I only use a card holder. It has most of my cards (duh), and that’s it really.

The important bits remain to describe the wearer

So THAT’S why the long face…

🐴

I never raised any eyebrows at IPs like these in movies and on TV. It’s just internet equivalent of fictitious phone numbers always containing 555.

I hear Sisyphus is looking to train his replacement. In fact, he says it’s a pretty cushy job, as there’s no need to pick things up, and definitely no putting them down

Depends on the skillset in question.

On one hand I work with IT/Clusters and robotics for the geophysical exploration sector. 20 years, probably. Beyond that and it gets dubious apart from this one system that actually runs on MS-DOS to this day (because MS-DOS is surprisingly good at realtime stuff if you want it to do something very simple).

On the other hand I do a lot of digital I/O and automation which would probably be very useful in the 60s, maybe even before if I manage to join the pioneers.

On top of that, I grew up on a dairy farm, and learned a lot of that trade from my dad. I can milk a cow by hand, so if that was all I needed to do, I could go back all the way to Mesopotamia.