Fishing plays an important part in supplying food and providing jobs, however fishermen in the sea face many dangers such as storms, typhoons and other natural disasters. In Vietnam there are more than 27,000 far-shore fishing boats curently operating and according to statistics, seasonal typhoons claim several hundreds of fishermen' lives and damaged hundreds of fishing boats annually. Analysis h
as shown that the main cause for loss of lives is the lack of a reliable communication channel between fishing boats and shore stations to provide timely predictions on natural disaster as well as during search-and-rescue operations. To combat this problem, improving natural disaster prediction and response for fishermen we propose a HF digital radio communication system (basically a tablet running Android or Windows 8 OS) for fishing boats with the following characteristics:
- Utilizes digital modulation technique with higher reliability than traditional analog voice communication
- Compatible with existing communication equipment already installed on fishing boats
- Automatically receives and visually display weather forecasts, reports fishing boats location to authority periodically to aid during emergencies. In other words, we seeks to provide a “digital bridge” - communication channel between fishing boats and shore stations utilizing existing HF transceiver onboard the boats. We believe that our solution will create an ICT infrastructure connecting fishing boats with land-based networks which has the potential to open up a new market for both new hardware and software to be developed.
