Thread: vhf radio

Yep. Not hard to do the restricted radio licence to allow you to use the VHF for non-emergency purposes (including routine trip reports and gasbagging with ya mates). Interestingly enough - the Coastguard procedure at the moment assigns ownership of a callsign to an individual and not to the vessel. You might have the callsign on the vessel's commercial survey documentation but you can't lodge the ownership of the callsign to the vessel, so if you purchase a vessel in survey you have to apply for a new callsign with coastguard then do all of the transfer paperwork for MNZ as well as (to be strictly correct) getting the radio inspection redone and the commercial radio survey reissued with the correct callsign. Not as much of a pain for a recreational boat not in survey, but a rather pesky hassle for a commercial tub with MNZ - then you have to change all of the EPIRB records with RCCNZ to reflect the new callsign.

That's one system that is frustratingly over-complicated for commercial, largely because coastguard have the monopoly on callsign issuing in NZ... Whinge mode off!