Web-based Interface for Digital Maritime Distress

Project goal: To eliminate the United States Coast Guard’s reliance on expensive proprietary software for digital distress signaling. Digital selective calling is an international standard paging system used by the United States Coast Guard to automate distress and safety alerts sent over terrestrial medium-frequency, high-frequency and very-high-frequency marine radio systems. Most digital selective calling systems rely upon commercial off-the-shelf products with proprietary interfaces. The proprietary nature of these systems limits the ability for maintenance contractors to perform technology refreshes and improvements on Coast Guard systems. The system designed uses an open standard radio interface for processing packetized digital selective calling data. The design incorporates a web-based graphical user interface that can send, receive and acknowledge digital selective calling messages. Processed messages are displayed in real time with a sortable 30-day message history. Archiving capability is included to allow the storage and retrieval of messages through an automatically generated file format.