For the second time in a few months the British REscue Service has put out to sea looking for a ship putting out a distress call. And again the call turns out to be a “faulty” Television set-top box. Now I know the FCC is pretty on top of the electronic spectrum to make sure things like this don’t happen in the US… but supposedly the British Ofcom is looking into this as well, and still calling it a “rare situation.”
Here is the story in question.
Dodgy digital box sparks big search
Wed Feb 15, 2006 9:12 AM ET
LONDON (Reuters) – Lifeboats and a helicopter scoured the sea to track down an electronic distress signal — only for coastguards to discover it came from a British retiree’s faulty digital television box on dry land.
The coastguards were scrambled after a rescue coordination center in Scotland picked up what it believed to be a distress signal coming from the sea off southern England.
But communications experts later traced the signal to the digital television set-top box in the home of 67-year-old Mary Donaldson in the western town of Plymouth.
“We sent a helicopter out and two lifeboats before we discovered that the signal was in fact coming from inland,” a spokesman for the coastguards said Wednesday.
Donaldson was at the cinema when the experts tracked down the signal. “We sent two officers there to investigate and they were still there when the lady came home,” the spokesman said.
The incident late last month was the second time this year a set-top box in Britain has been blamed for a distress signal. Communications regulator Ofcom said both boxes were being analyzed but stressed such cases were extremely rare.
Tags: Humor, Irony, Technology
