RYA VHF Handbook (G31)

Publisher: RYA; £11.99
Publication Date: rep. 2006

There is a choice of RYA publications purporting to teach you how to use VHF so which should you buy or study? These are either the RYA VHF Handbook (G31) @ £11.99 or the RYA VHF Radio including GMDSS (G22) @£5.50? So, why would one want to pay an extra £6.49 for the Handbook? You wouldn’t, according to Peter Jackson, who teaches the RYA SRC course for the CA.

However, the VHF Handbook is written by a very experienced RYA Instructor who has written several excellent text books. Moreover Tim Bartlett does seem to have studied both the full set of 4 volumes of the Radio Regulations and the shorter one volume of the extracts which apply to the Marine Environment: the Manual for use by the Maritime Mobile and Maritime Mobile-Satellite Services, which is an A4 sized paperback about 2cm thick. His Handbook is a better précis of this than is the RYA G22. For example, he tells the reader how to make a routine call from ship to ship or ship to shore, which is a basic instruction missing from the G22!

This vital instruction on how to make a ‘call’ is illustrated clearly in a cartoon strip on page 31. The cartoon strip approach is used throughout the handbook and though one could find this irksome it is very clear. Unfortunately, the illustration advises ‘Give the name or callsign of the vessel you are calling, up to three times …’ and this is something I, as both an ex professional radio operator and more recently, a fighter controller, find extremely irritating. As I do any time I hear any callsigns repeated 3 (or more) times when the ‘call’ is about anything other than an emergency. The characteristic of all emergency calls is that the callsigns are repeated exactly 3 times and it is for that reason that the procedure should not be used for routine calls. This error is compounded by repetitions, using cartoon strips, on pages 35, 36 & 39! A number of detailed comments and corrections that affect an otherwise excellent text book have been forwarded to the publishers. – Ian Galletti