Further to the article titled ” New IMO Proposals for VDR and SVDR Data Download and Playback “, the IMO Safety of Navigation Circular SN246 was published and can be found by clicking here.

This document was used as the basis for the drafting of a Playback Standard by the IEC ( International Electrotechnical Commission ) specialised working group.

A significant part of this exercise was conducted last November (2005) when Kelvin Hughes hosted a meeting at their Hainault headquarters, attended by some twenty eight IEC delegates from around the world. The creation of this new Playback Standard was included as an Annexe to the overall Technical and Test Standard for SVDR which was published in March 2006 as IEC 61996-2.

As can be seen from SN246, the IMO recommended that the harmonisation should be implemented in two stages. The first stage applies to VDR/SVDR systems installed on or after 1st July 2006 with the second stage applying to existing installations which must have the feature available after 1st July 2007.

In the simplest terms the IMO recommendation means that a method of extracting the stored data onto a laptop must be available from the VDR/SVDR.