I have been cruising non stop for some 10 years. Mainly around the Pacific and Asia. I am one of those few people that test everything they possibly can, from automatic fire suppression systems, through DSC Distress, EPIRBS, auto activated PFD’s, Harness, Smoke detectors, Carbon monoxide detectors, etc. If its on my yacht I have FULLY tested it, with the exception of EPIRB. I have also followed up on a number incidents with the various accident investigation agencies in this part of the world (South Pacific Asia)
In relation to EPRIB I pursued this in depth as much as loan private person can for quite some time with both manufactures and authorities after it came to my attention that fishing boat off the US coast had been lost, along with two lives, and the recovered EPRIB had been set off but no signal was ever received. This EPIRB was the same brand and manufacture as mine, then another in France. The numbers of definitive failures began to grow. Towards the end the French banned the GME unit and a recall noticed was issued for certain batches ( I believe worldwide), of which it was estimated about 50% of those that were recalled were actually returned. So there is still a bunch out there that MAY not work. Recently a member of the Volvo team has been sadly lost at Sea. Unfortunately I do not have the facts to this incident, but its worth noting that it is stated he had all his safety gear on at the time (excluding the harness) including a new custom designed PFD Lifejack specifically for the race which is said to include both personal EPIRB, and AIS, yet there it would seem no positional information was available and he was not recovered.
As far as standard testing goes by the owner I can tell you that in the case of two manufactures that testing is almost worthless and amounts to little more than an inferior battery test at best. It does not even turn on the transmitter, nor does it obtain a GPS position lock, pathetic in my view. it simply applies power to a microprocessor. There is absolutely no reason the manufactures could not easily add better testing, to at least obtain a GPS lock and fire up the transmitter all be it they cannot transmit. The architecture in place is outdated and even if the manufactures did offer to include some live testing in their product, the infrastructure would be saturated given the number of EPIRB’s that are out there and the current architecture.
The authorities responsible for monitoring these are effectively 20 + Nations each with their own subset of rules, resources and area under a fairly lose worldwide umbrella. When your EPRIB is set off the global satellite system will re-route your distress information based on its inbuilt hex code imbedded in the unit to area where the unit was purchased, “irrespective !! “ of any registration information, or lack there off. It does NOT go to the country where the boat is, nor to where its registered, unless they all happen to be the same. So if as in my case the EPIRB was purchased in Australia, and the boat registration has been moved to New Zealand, and say I am in Malaysia, that is very problematic, and I would not hold my breath for a rescue The call will automatically go to Australia. Based on ships name and international registration being NZ, they will attempt to hand over responsibility to NZ as it is a NZ registered Vessel, but New Zealand would not see the distress information because it will have been routed to Australia. Australia will take a lot of convincing (believe me) to hold your EPIRB registration details when its an NZ registered boat and could well have deleted it. There answer is buy new NZ EPIRBs costly & difficult when you’re not in NZ. This whole registration issue and hard hex coding also applies to MMSI, and DSC. So if you have these disparate issues you may never get past the first hurdle and you most certainly should check directly with your authorities.
Once they know who you are, and have tried the various contacts you should have listed, to make sure that you haven’t just tossed it out, in our example Australia will contact Malaysia and advise them the location and position information, and it will now be up to Malaysia. In the past responses from Malaysia and presumably any equivalent country have taken a day or two, and ended with we don’t have a boat, couldn’t find a ship etc. By which time if you are still alive your EPIRB has probably stopped sending out its position and the battery is now flat. There are number of these cases reported as well. In my case and I STRESS this is against all advice from RCC and the authorities, I will be turning my EPIRB off every hour, so 1 hour on, 1 hour off. Max time to get a lock is 15 min, so in the first hour it should have sent the position information out at least 4 times. At least my way it should not run out of battery before they find me.
When I dug into all of this, I was advised there are live tests done of the system approximately every year or when any major software change is done. This test requires all participating countries to agree and as you can imagine that in itself would be a challenge. I tried to get my unit to be the initiating unit of this test and while I got close in the end I was unsuccessful. From there I moved to suggesting point blank what will happen if I accidently trip over the unit and it goes off. You can imagine they weren’t impressed with that suggestion, but in fact disclosed that if it was a real case of accidently triggered and if I called them before any rescue services had been dispatched it was highly likely that I would not be significantly fined if at all. My last option which I believe would work if one was still determined to test the unit would be to set it off inside the microwave or some appropriately contained RF cage along with any 406mhz receiver. This would at least confirm the unit can transmit.
Personally anyone cruising other than coastal stuff around a well setup major city/country should not be relying on any one piece of equipment like an EPIRB, and you should assume it will fail, for no other reason other than insureing you have an alternative. In my case VHF & HF DSC, and Satelite emergency distress on Sat phone
I hope this helps.