The Ship That Was On the Wrong Frequency — Illegally

A cable-laying vessel working the Lincolnshire offshore wind farms had 30 failing radios and a ship sailing at midnight. The problem wasn’t the hardware. It was the supplier who’d never programmed a marine radio in their life.

Satellite Radio Integration

The situation

The call came in from a vessel sitting off the eastern coast of the UK. The man on the other end was a contractor working aboard a cable-laying ship, sub-contracted to install the service cables for newly built offshore wind farms along the Lincolnshire coast.

Six months earlier, the company had bought 30 Icom handheld radios from a large marine industrial supplier. The price had looked good. The radios had not.

Now they wanted to replace the lot — 30 brand new Motorola CP040s, budget approximately £6,000. Could Yesway quote?

The diagnosis nobody else made

Our first instinct was the obvious one: IP rating. The Icom models they’d bought were lower-end units, and a salty offshore atmosphere is unforgiving to radios that aren’t properly sealed. The CP040 they were asking about had its own IP limitations in that environment, which we flagged — but we suspected the story was more complicated.

Before quoting for 30 new radios, we asked to see the ship.

The vessel had docked at the Port of Sunderland. We drove up from Lincoln and inspected the existing Icom handsets. They were, physically, perfectly serviceable radios. The internal PCBs showed none of the white oxidisation crust you see when an inadequately sealed radio has been losing its battle with sea air for months.

The problem was the programming.

The supplier who’d sold them the radios had simply never configured them for marine use. No marine VHF channels. No correct frequency plan for dockside and vessel operations. No understanding of the regulatory framework that governs radio communications at sea.

The fact that the radios worked at all — however unreliably — was coincidence, not competence.

The response

The ship was sailing at midnight.

We were authorised to carry out the reprogramming at 4:30 PM. We got back in the car, drove back through the evening, and completed the full reprogramming of all 30 radios before the vessel left port.

Every handset was correctly configured for the appropriate marine radio frequencies, set up for the operational profile of an offshore cable-laying vessel, and compliant with Ofcom licensing requirements.

The ship sailed on time. The radios worked properly — probably for the first time since they’d been bought.

What this case illustrates

This isn’t a story about bad radios. The Icom handsets were fine. It’s a story about what happens when radio equipment is treated as a commodity purchase — box-shifted by a supplier with no real-world knowledge of the operating environment.

Marine radio frequencies are regulated. Offshore working vessels operate under specific licensing conditions. Programming a commercial radio handset is not a default-settings job — it requires knowledge of the frequency allocations, the operational context, and the regulatory framework the vessel operates within.

A generic industrial supplier doesn’t have that. A company whose founder lectured at South Shields Marine School does.

Working offshore? Here’s what to check

If your vessel’s radio communications were set up by a non-specialist supplier, it’s worth verifying three things before you’re in a situation like this one:

1. Frequency compliance. Are your handsets programmed for the correct licensed marine frequencies for your operational area? Amateur frequencies are not a legal alternative.

2. IP rating for your environment. Not all radios described as “marine” are built for offshore exposure. IP67 and IP68 ratings matter in salt air environments.

3. Your licence coverage. Does your Ofcom ship licence cover the channels and power levels your radios are actually using?

If you’re not certain of any of those answers, the answer is probably no.