April 4, 2012 – SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — U.S. Coast Guard officials continued the nationwide rollout of the service’s new Rescue-21 communications system in South Portland on Wednesday, touting the state-of-the-art technology as an upgrade that will save lives.
Using a series of 10 shared and dedicated communications towers up the Maine coast — part of a larger $1 billion nationwide network of 232 such towers — Coast Guard search teams can use digital triangulation to pinpoint the broadcast points of distress calls.
“Rescue-21 adds power by providing lines of bearing from one or more shore-based towers to identify the location of distressed callers using the intersections of those lines,” said Capt. Christopher Roberge, commander of U.S. Coast Guard Sector Northern New England, during a ceremony and demonstration Wednesday. “In cases where we can bring Rescue-21 to bear, that means more defined and smaller search areas, which in turn means less time searching before we find what we’re looking for.”
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