Marine or Ham MF/HF radio?

I posted this on the Facebook forum Offshore SSB Radio and Email
and I thought it might be worth posting here as well

If you need an HF/MF radio for safety because of the area where you cruise, specifically sea areas A2-A4 (out of VHF range), you need it to be DSC equipped, which basically means an (Icom) M801 or M802 at the moment. The reason is that you can call for help to ships outside VHF range and they keep a continuous automatic watch on DSC MF/HF. If you have that need, and hence get the marine radio, you can use the same radio on ham frequencies if you have an amateur license. They are not quite as good as a ham radio as they are more awkward to use for spinning the tuning knob to find some one transmitting, but they will do. There is loads you can do with a ham radio (or a marine radio on ham frequencies). Ham nets, Winlink mail, sailldocs, loads of different ways of position reporting like robust packed APRS and WSPR. You can talk to random hams around the world and they will think its cool to be talking to someone "Maritime Mobile". Of course some of this definitely contributes to safety as well as fun. For those thinking of taking their ham license it is well worth it if only that you understand radio including propagation and fault fixing much better than a typical course for a Long Range Certificate that qualifies you to operate a marine MF/HF radio (even when this qualification is very serious, like in the UK, with a long practical test by the CG, mainly on distress procedures and a written exam). There are also email services (sailmail) and nets for cruisers on marine HF frequencies. I think this is where cruisers are tempted to, often illegally, use a ham radio only not a marine one. It is usually possible to open them to transmit on these bands. A slight word of caution that the performance might not be the same as on ham bands for which the radio was optimised. Also if you had a ham radio on board it would be a wise precaution to open it to marine (and aviation) MF/HF bands just in case. But these days there are very few places where anyone maintains a listening watch on marine MF/HF voice frequencies. You may well be better off shouting for help on a popular ham frequency and asking them to relay it to a MRCC by telephone in that situation.