406MHz I think is referencing PLBs and EPIRBs, which I'm guessing you're familiar with from sailing. The power is high enough that satellites can be used to get gross location, with radio direction finding being used by rescue party
Other than the compass (which was only visible in the day time) the EPIRB was the only piece of equipment we assumed to work on the aforementioned voyage. We of course didn't test it as we were able to make it back safely, but I should probably learn more about how it functions.
I’m surprised that things like US military-style tritium-illuminated compasses aren’t more popular or widely used for cases like this.
They’re very safe, last something like 10 years, and aren’t really expensive (compared to “I need to know what direction I’m going and have no way to do so, or can’t see it”).
It would have been a delightful addition and honestly would have kept us much safer. It was fairly easy to keep Orion's belt just port of the mast, but occasionally cloud cover or weather would make that more difficult.
with no propulsion, I'm assuming you were just drifting and not really doing to much navigation. just curious if you tried any celestial navigation at night to attempt any sense of direction?
Yeah. We mostly just picked out a set of stars and kept them roughly to position. Every so often we'd try to illuminate the fixed compass with a phone to ensure that we hadn't wildly drifted from our expected bearing (also, stars move over the course of the night and I have no idea how much)
It was an old race boat, we had ample wind, and the owner casually bragged that he'd replaced the sails with ones that were "about 30% too big for the boat."
We were sailing like demons. One of my biggest regrets of the trip was that we didn't have any wind or speed instrumentation to let us know how fast we were going, but it felt extremely fast.
