Distress Beacons for Maritimal Accidents: Measurements of Coastal Sea Coverage

In this paper a developed multiplatform communication system is introduced which main purpose is to provide real time positioning of the fishing or recreation boats, that habitually moves in the marine zones named as A1 and A2. The system also has facilities to automate the alert signal generation coming from a boat operating in these marine zones using GSM/GPRS. An outdoor measurement campaign was carried out to determine the availability of such systems in terms of cellular signal power strength. An estimation of coverage was determined. Measurement results have been compared with those provide by the application of ITU-R Recommendation P. 1546-2.