Technology Report

September 1, 2026

SOLION-100

HAMBURG — For decades, a ship that needed a satellite distress radio had one official path. In 2020 Iridium opened a second. On September 1, 2026, Furuno Electric and Iridium Communications announced the SOLION-100, a single terminal that uses that second path and also handles ship security and long-range tracking.

GMDSS is the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, the international radio safety net for ships. Under the Safety of Life at Sea Convention, cargo ships of 300 gross tons and up, and passenger ships, have to carry it. It is how a crew sends a distress alert, gets weather and navigation warnings, and talks to a rescue center.

What is new is the box. Furuno put Iridium GMDSS, the Ship Security Alert System, and Long-Range Identification and Tracking on one Certus 100 terminal. SSAS is the silent alarm a crew can send if the ship is under attack. LRIT is the position report governments use to know where a ship is. Those jobs used to mean extra hardware.

Iridium, of McLean, Virginia, flies a low-Earth-orbit constellation. Furuno, based in Nishinomiya, Japan, builds marine electronics. Iridium GMDSS entered service in 2020 after the International Maritime Organization recognized it. The companies call that the first new satellite GMDSS service since the system was set up. Because the satellites move over the poles, Iridium says the coverage includes waters that geostationary satellites miss.

The companies say the terminal is meant to carry a crew through a safety event. Iridium SafetyCast carries navigational and meteorological warnings. A single-button distress alert sends the ship’s identification, status, and position. Safety Voice is meant to let the crew speak with a rescue coordination center.

“The new SOLION-100 terminal for Iridium GMDSS allows us to strengthen our safety communications portfolio and provide customers with LEO satellite GMDSS technology alongside the Furuno navigation and communications systems they already rely on,” said Kiyoshi Furuno, head of the Marine Electronic Products Division.

Wouter Deknopper, Iridium’s vice president and general manager for maritime, said, “Together, we are giving shipowners and shipyards another way to equip vessels with reliable maritime safety communications, including in the polar regions.”

The companies said the terminal is for new ships and for retrofits. They expect retrofit units in late 2026 and newbuild units in 2027. Those dates are a schedule, not a shipping confirmation.

Iridium is exhibiting this week at SMM in Hamburg, September 1–4. The release lists booth Hall B6 Stand 313.

August 31, 2026

sMRT SHIELD+

HAMBURG — A personal locator beacon usually does one thing. It shouts to a satellite and waits. Wescom Group says the sMRT SHIELD+ does three. It calls the global rescue system. It calls ships nearby. And it can light up to tell the wearer the satellite heard the call.

Wescom will show the beacon at SMM, the Hamburg marine fair, September 1–4. sMRT is the electronics brand of Marine Rescue Technologies Limited, a Wescom company in Anlaby, East Yorkshire. The company presents the SHIELD+ as the first beacon on the Cospas-Sarsat 406 MHz network to combine that global alert with two-way digital selective calling. That “first” is Wescom’s claim.

Cospas-Sarsat is the international satellite system that listens for 406 MHz distress beacons. Digital selective calling, or DSC, is a VHF radio method ships use to ring each other with a digital distress. AIS, the Automatic Identification System, is the tracking broadcast that paints a position on a nearby chart plotter. Return Link Service, or RLS, is a short message back through Galileo. Cospas-Sarsat says an RLS-enabled beacon can show that the alert was received, located, and passed to government authorities. It does not mean a rescue has been launched.

Wescom says nearby vessels get an extra distress alert and an AIS location, and that the wearer can receive an acknowledgment. The sMRT product page lists 406 MHz, VHF DSC, and AIS in one compact unit, plus GPS and Galileo receivers, a 121.5 MHz homing transmitter, a strobe, an audible alarm, and a five-year battery. Those are manufacturer claims. The page is still marked Coming Soon.

The same page lists Class-M compliance with European decision ECC/DEC/(22)02, the rule for man-overboard devices. It describes visual notices through a DSC receiver and through RLS.

Wescom will also preview a SHIELD+ emergency position-indicating radio beacon, the float-free ship version, for early 2027. The company says that EPIRB will be the first fully compliant IMO MSC.471(101) beacon to put DSC, AIS, infrared, and Galileo RLS in one unit. MSC.471(101) is the IMO performance standard for float-free 406 MHz EPIRBs. That “first” is Wescom’s description. Boatnews describes the infrared as another way to find the beacon in the last phase of a search, and notes that published materials do not yet give DSC or AIS range, or the EPIRB price.

July 14, 2026

SAR4SaR

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — A small wooden boat is almost invisible to radar. Searchers then comb a lot of water. On July 14, New Zealand Defence Science and Technology said Seascape, the University of Auckland, and DST had that week put the first manufactured radar-reflector prototype in the Hauraki Gulf. The device folds. It has no battery. It is meant to bounce a satellite radar pulse back so the boat lights up in the picture.

The name is Synthetic Aperture Radar for Search and Rescue. Synthetic aperture radar is a satellite camera that uses radio, not light, so it can see through cloud and dark. The commercial name is Glint, from the Auckland startup Seascape. Earth-observation scientist Thomas Dowling and engineer Ella Fasciana built it with Defence Science and Technology, the science arm of the New Zealand Defence Force.

On May 12, 2026, the University of Auckland said Fasciana and Dowling are named on a patent with the university. Fasciana, co-founder and lead researcher of Glint by Seascape, told the university it folds to about the size of a pizza box. Open it, she said, tie it to the boat, and it reflects radar back to satellites overhead.

The reflector does not transmit. Corner plates of aluminum focus a radar pulse and send it back the way a corner mirror sends light. RNZ described the later prototype as two triangular wedges fastened back to back, foil lining the 90-degree corners — what Dowling called an “offset caterpillar.” On a radar image that return looks like a bright starburst. The university says software would scan the imagery for that signature.

Defence Science and Technology said Auckland Coastguard helped tether the manufactured unit to the Anchorite Rock wave buoy for about two weeks of satellite collects and a durability check. DST called that a shift from a science program to an engineering problem: make something durable and cheap enough to manufacture. A Royal New Zealand Air Force P-8A Poseidon was training nearby, the post said. Seascape’s Glint page still says the team is creating the reflectors, not shipping them. In May the university wrote that the company was in the middle of a capital raise aimed at commercialization.

Work started in the fabrication space at Te Pūnaha Ātea — Auckland Space Institute. Fasciana began with origami paper to find a shape that folded flat and still made corners. Computer models screened shapes. Dozens of prototypes were built from corflute, gaffer tape, aluminum foil, and tarpaulins. Early tests at the university’s Ardmore field station asked whether satellites could even see the things from orbit.

The New Zealand Defence Force wrote that the Royal New Zealand Navy then tested a prototype from HMNZS Canterbury near subantarctic Campbell Island. Auckland and NZDF both say the reflector stayed visible to commercial satellites in 50-knot gusts. RNZ reported that the units spun, which pushed the team to add stability. DST director Dr. David Galligan told RNZ the satellite snap showed bright spots on the water.

New Zealand’s Rescue Coordination Centre covers about 30 million square kilometers, NZDF says. In 2023/24 it ran 489 searches. NZDF’s pitch is a smaller search box. Dowling has said the reflector would not replace emergency beacons or radios. Fasciana has talked about a low-cost backup for Pacific fishing boats, including boats whose 406 MHz beacon is broken. Radar satellites do not revisit as often as a beacon pings. RNZ quoted Dowling on a patchwork of commercial satellite data, and on using drift models for a position that may be an hour or two old. The university has also flagged false positives from ice and some waves.

New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment lists a Catalyst: Strategic SAR4SAR PhD from June 1, 2026, to May 31, 2029, delivered by the University of Auckland and Seascape. The Catalyst page names U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and Umbra Space as partners. Those are stated partnerships, not an independent test report.

June 2026

LunaSAR

ADELAIDE, Australia — A distress beacon has always been a shout. It cannot hear back. In the June 2026 Journal of Space Safety Engineering, researchers reported a prototype that talked — voice and text — on the same 406 MHz channel rescue agencies already use. Rice et al., JSSE 13(2), call it the first demonstration of that two-way traffic on the allocated distress band. The radio waveform is named Beagle. The project is LunaSAR.

406 MHz is the international distress frequency for personal locator beacons, EPIRBs, and aircraft emergency locators. Cospas-Sarsat is the satellite system that listens. Today’s beacons send a one-way SOS. LunaSAR is a research attempt to put a conversation on that same channel.

The hardware comes from Safety from Space, an Australian satellite-communications company. SmartSat CRC says the prototype was built with NASA’s Search and Rescue Laboratory. SmartSat calls LunaSAR a geolocation and austere-communications system for stranded astronauts. Safety from Space says it has been developing Beagle since 2018, on small, low-power radios meant for hard environments, drawing on mobile satellite research, U.S. Department of Defense tracking work, and Cospas-Sarsat.

SmartSat reported a demonstration co-funded by the South Australian Government through the South Australia Space Industry Centre. The Australian Space Agency supported the event through Australian astronaut GPCAPT Katherine Bennell-Pegg. RFShop Australia, a hardware partner, dates the live field test to August 28, 2025, at Lot Fourteen in Adelaide. SmartSat says Safety from Space showed simultaneous voice and text through modifications to the second-generation Cospas-Sarsat beacon standard, using operational search-and-rescue frameworks coordinated with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

The June paper reports that trial. The published abstract says the work is part of an effort toward standardizing LunaSAR as a possible piece of LunaNet, NASA’s planned lunar communications network. Test cases, the authors write, were based on inputs from the NASA Search and Rescue Office, which they say is observing the project. South Australia’s remote terrain stood in for a lunar analog. The demonstration used low-power radios tested with Galileo satellites that already serve the International Cospas-Sarsat Programme. That two-way claim is the paper’s. The full methods sit behind a paywall.

NASA’s Search and Rescue office at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, describes LunaSAR as a lunar concept. On its Goddard search-and-rescue page, NASA says the work extends Earth practice to the lunar surface and would use LunaNet as a backbone for rescue data. A 2021 NASA abstract by Cody Kelly put the end goal as timely distress indication for lunar-surface users, with performance modeled on Cospas-Sarsat. When fielded, that abstract said, LunaSAR would be the first dedicated search-and-rescue notification system on another celestial body. That is a research claim, not an operational service.

The satellites that already listen for 406 MHz beacons are a different project, MEOSAR, the medium-orbit layer of Cospas-Sarsat. LunaSAR is a beacon and waveform that tries to put two-way traffic on that channel. Cospas-Sarsat’s June 2026 supplement describes a separate two-way service still under development for second-generation beacons: canned answers to formal questions. That planned service is not a voice circuit, and Cospas-Sarsat does not present it as fielded.

There is no catalog to buy a LunaSAR beacon. NASA and SmartSat have said the research is also meant to help first responders on Earth. It remains a prototype.

May 25, 2026

LOC8

FLAGSTAFF — The drone flight is the easy part. Then someone has to look at the pictures. The Coconino County Sheriff’s Office is using software that looks at every pixel for a shirt color, Arizona’s Family reported. After a drone covers a search area, the office runs the photos through LOC8. If the missing person was last seen in red, the software hunts for red.

Deputy Paul Clifton, the assistant search-and-rescue coordinator, told the station the problem is not the flight. It is the pictures. “As opposed to looking at thousands of photographs with the human eye that fatigues in 10 minutes, we’re leveraging automation tools,” he said. His illustration — “Maybe it reduces the number of photos you have to look at from a thousand down to twenty” — is his estimate.

“I’m looking for red because we believe that that’s what the person was last seen wearing,” Clifton said. He told the station the software accounts for how light reflects off objects. If LOC8 flags something, he said, it gives searchers a GPS location. DroneXL, writing on May 25, named the current package Loc8 G2, from Unmanned Systems Research of Saskatoon, and said Coconino is pairing it with AI-capable Skydio drones.

The product exists because a search once missed a person who was in the photos. Commercial UAV News reported in 2020 that Loc8, pronounced “locate,” was released in 2019 after searchers went through more than 1,500 drone images and did not find the missing person. Weeks later they concluded the subject had been captured in several frames, partly hidden by evergreen, and was not identifiable from the air with the naked eye. Anthony Lockly, co-founder and chief executive of Loc8 LLC, told the trade paper that the industry had focused on the aircraft, not on software to read the pictures.

Unmanned Systems Research describes Loc8 G2 as a second-generation color image-analysis tool. The company says it works at the individual pixel and can put a flagged target on a map. Commercial UAV News said the algorithm scans imagery from drones, manned aircraft, and ground cameras against user-defined color palettes.

Coconino has flown drones since 2018, Arizona’s Family reported. The office now flies Skydio drones with obstacle avoidance from six onboard cameras. Clifton said that sphere of vision helps in canyons where GPS is poor. DroneXL wrote that the program began with two DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise aircraft and later moved to Skydio.

The sheriff’s office is also working with an unnamed company in Scotland to train models on Northern Arizona terrain, Clifton told Arizona’s Family. “Northern Arizona versus Southern Arizona, the context, the environments are very different.” He said the tools can re-analyze video from past flights. He also said the custom-training feature is still being tested.

A documented Loc8 case, separate from Coconino, came out of Moose Lake, Minnesota. The Moose Lake Star Gazette reported in March 2024 that drone operator Earl Bakke used Loc8 on about 1,200 photographs while searching wooded land for Gerald Knapp, 86, who had dementia. Bakke said that within an hour and a half the program identified a grouping of red pixels, and closer analysis determined it was the missing man.

The same idea — drone photographs, then software looking for a color that does not belong — has shown up on other searches. In January 2026, BBC Future described mountain rescuers in Italy’s Piemonte region using AI to sort thousands of drone images after climber Nicola Ivaldo went missing. The software flagged a red helmet. That was a parallel use of drone-photo AI, not Loc8.