For several years the U.S. Coast Guard’s emergency VHF radio system has experienced outages across Southeast and the Gulf of Alaska. There’s been progress fixing the problem, but some mariners’ distress calls are still falling through the cracks. So another entity has stepped in to help fill the communications void.
Some distress calls, like the one sent out from the F/V Defender in the Gulf of Alaska via VHF radio in May, 2024, are going unheard by the Coast Guard’s towers in various areas of the Gulf, specifically around Kodiak Island. That’s mainly due to harsh weather conditions, aging equipment and remote geographic areas where the communications infrastructure is set up.
And when there is an outage at one of the VHF towers, the Coast Guard typically doesn’t service those themselves. Tatitlek Federal Services Inc. (TFSI), a subsidiary of the Alaska Native Tatitlek Corporation headquartered in Anchorage, is the contractor that services the Remote Fixed Facilities (RFFs) on Kodiak Island. A public affairs officer with USCG’s District 17, Mike Salerno, said via email that Tatitlek has been the sustainment contractor since June of 2022.
Since 2018, the Coast Guard has noted widespread VHF outages within its Rescue 21 Alaska system, which includes 33 sites equipped with radio towers that allow the Coast Guard to monitor and respond to emergency calls from boaters across Southeast Alaska, the Gulf and areas around Kodiak Island.
Gaps or recent degradation in the system can lead to potentially fatal incidents on the water.
“And until we started installing equipment, we didn't necessarily know what calls were going unreceived or unmonitored,” Bryan Hinderberger, the chief technical officer for Marine Exchange of Alaska, said. “But we quickly started to realize that there were events occurring out there on the water that maybe the Coast Guard was not aware of.”
The Marine Exchange of Alaska, a nongovernmental agency based out of Juneau, has been acting as a 24/7 middle man between mariners and the Coast Guard across Alaska’s waters for multiple years. It has had a contract with the U.S. Coast Guard since 2006 for delivering Automatic Identification System (AIS) Service data, but in 2022 transitioned from a concept to what Hinderberger described as “lifesaving action.”
The nonprofit is currently working to expand its coverage and add more marine safety sites around the Gulf of Alaska and Southeast.
“We started out targeting areas that we already knew the Coast Guard had deficiencies or experienced trouble in so that we could kind of fill the gaps, so to speak,” Hinderberger said. “We aren’t trying to replace Rescue 21. We’re trying to supplement it and provide some additional redundancy to it.”
Coast Guard officers agree that redundancy is a good policy, as they encourage mariners to always have a backup communication device like a cell phone or a EPIRB, in addition to a VHF radio onboard.
The Coast Guard gave an updated report to Congress detailing the status of its Rescue 21 Alaska system back in the summer of 2023, after addressing outages at roughly a third of its VHF towers in Southeast from a few years prior.
The Coast Guard Commandant at the time, Linda Fagan, who was recently relieved of her position, committed to upgrading the system to reduce its VHF tower outages. And since then, the Coast Guard says it has made progress on addressing these outages across Southeast.
Lieutenant Jake Carlton, the Chief of Security with Coast Guard District 17, which encompasses all of Alaska’s coastlines, told KMXT in a phone call on Jan. 28 that as of Dec. 31, 2024, the Rescue 21 Alaska network reported an operational availability or up-time of 97.2%.
While the outages are less common than they were several years ago, there are still some instances that VHF calls aren't getting through to the Coast Guard.
Some of those gaps overlap with areas where the Marine Exchange maintains its own equipment around Kodiak Island, in places like Elbow Mountain, Pillar Mountain and McCord Mountain.
The organization also helps fill those gaps elsewhere on Alaska’s coastline with its own infrastructure, and it collects data from more than 60 marine safety sites, many of which can receive and transmit distress calls. Rescue 21 Alaska does not include VHF coverage in Western and Northern Alaska as the Coast Guard’s sites can’t receive distress calls north of Bristol Bay and the Aleutians.
Hinderberger said Marine Exchange's equipment, which uses VOIP VHF for distress signal communications and still has a line of sight capability, is set up at higher elevations, and at sea level too, which makes it easier to maintain and prevents prolonged outages.
“We don’t just strictly install up on mountaintops, because we know mountaintops in Alaska are some of the harshest environments to operate and exist in,” he explained. “And it degrades equipment faster this time of the year, when the weather is far more harsh than in the summer.”
One incident when Marine Exchange heard a distress call that the Coast Guard did not receive via VHF was a search and rescue in Marmot Bay – north of the city of Kodiak – back in November. It ended positively after several attempts to contact the distressed boat. But Hinderberger said the result could have been much worse.
“Based on the fact that the Coast Guard went back the next day to locate the vessel and it was no longer present, indicates that it either floated out to sea or sunk, is what we’re assuming to have happened," he stated. "And if those three mariners were unable to have been extracted from that event, it very likely would have ended far more tragically.”
Other examples include the Pan Viva in Unalaska in October of 2024 and the F/V Tanusha sinking near Kodiak earlier this month.
According to a proposed timeline from the Coast Guard, the agency plans to replace all of its Alaska Rescue 21 base station radios, spread across 33 remote sites, by the end of fiscal year 2026. The Coast Guard says this will significantly improve the system’s up-time and reduce outages by replacing the end-of-life radios with “internet protocol (IP) capable solution, which enables remote management and troubleshooting, and will result in increased operational availability and reduced downtime by allowing significant troubleshooting activities to occur without traveling to the remote site.”
