Long Range Certificate Course

In cases where received messages are printed by the receiver, sufficient rolls of paper should be carried on board and there should always be enough paper in the receiver.

The receiver should be turned on for at least four hours before sailing. This ensures that at least one message is received at the scheduled transmission time. The receiver could be turned on permanently also if the vessel is sailing often. This avoids the chance of losing vital information, which could affect the vessel during its voyage.

The Equipment Operating Manual should be available close to the equipment, and you should pay particular attention to the fact that the receiver may be programmed differently from other manufacturers and models.

A plasticized copy of the NAVAREAs in which the vessel is likely to sail, showing at least the NAVTEX CRS, their coverage ranges, their respective transmission time schedules and their CRS identifiers should be available next to the receiver. All of this might be found in ALRS Volume 5 or in the ITU List of Coast Station and Special Service Station (List-IV).

The receiver should be programmed to accept only those messages identified with the CRS identifier of the NAVTEX CRS which covers the area in which the vessel is currently sailing, and the one covering the area into which it is about to sail. This will avoid the receiver printing information which has no relevance to the voyage and will avoid an unnecessary waste of paper.

The receiver should be programmed to accept only those message types the crew wish to receive. It is recommended that most message types are accepted, but those for navaid equipments, for example Loran, with which the vessel is not fitted may be excluded. Message types A, B, D and L must be included, as they are mandatory.

Extra care should be taken not to confuse the programming of CRS identifiers with those types of messages, because in both cases only the letters from A to Z are displayed. It is very easy for an operator to believe that he/she is programming CRS identifiers, when in fact they are programming message types.

On single frequency receivers 518 kHz frequency should always be selected. The receiver could be switched to 490 kHz frequency just for a few minutes to receive a message at the scheduled transmission time.

If the NAVTEX message is received incomplete/garbled, the relevant NAVTEX CRS should be informed, giving the time of reception (UTC) and vessel's position. This will help to improve the system.

Any safety critical incident observed during the voyage must be passed immediately to the nearest or most convenient CRS in order that other vessels can be informed via the NAVTEX system (if the CRS considers it necessary for all vessels in its operational area to receive information about such an incident).