Merry Christmas … and almost Happy New Year.

As you may know last year we started to build a system to aid the information capturing onboard our rescue vessel. The system is called RVMS. As of today the system effectively captures telemetry information from the vessel data network (NMEA 0183) and includes it with the log entry. This allows for the accurate capture of GPS co-ordinates, speed, depth, etc while creating a log entry.

We evolved the system to upload the data to a central site so that there was a backup of the data.

The next logical step was to make a web interface to view the data from the boat. It became clear while making the web interface that we could do much more with this web interface to help us, and other units better manager their vessel and unit. Time keeping was an obvious choice. We are already recording when members are on the boat this introduced a great way to capture this information as well for reporting purposes. For us the time we put in every year is reported back to some of our funding sources to justify the money being spent.

I am happy to announce that the beginning of the website is ready to be used. We wanted to get this done so that time can be tracked for the 2014 season. This application will be the tool to manage the onboard application as well. We will continue to update the web interface ta add features over the next few months. This will enable the roll out of RVMS to other rescue vessels this year.

To learn more, or sign up you can go to www.rvms.org to learn more.

Happy Holidays from all of us PARA Rescue!!