McMurdo Brand Guidelines: SmartFind and FastFind Beacons From Portsmouth

Beacons, radios and a company register.

McMurdo is a British brand of distress beacons, AIS devices and radios for ships and small craft, run today from a customer service and training hub in Portsmouth. Its owner, the Dutch company Seas of Solutions, says the McMurdo brand dates from 1937, when it made radios; that early date rests on the company’s own account.

The company register gives a firmer outline of the later years. Companies House records a company named The McMurdo Instrument Company Limited from January 1963; it became McMurdo Limited in September 1989, gave up the McMurdo name in 2007, and was dissolved in 2023 under a different name. The present McMurdo Limited was incorporated in July 2009 and is registered in Southsea, in Portsmouth. The register lists the Dutch company Netwave Systems BV, part of Seas of Solutions, as the company with significant control.

By the mid-2000s the brand had the product families it still sells. In August 2006 MarineLink reported that McMurdo had gained COSPAS-SARSAT type approval for its new Smartfind EPIRB, short for emergency position-indicating radio beacon, in two versions: the standard Smartfind E5 and the Smartfind Plus G5, which added a built-in GPS receiver. COSPAS-SARSAT is the international satellite system that receives signals from such beacons, and the report said the approval meant the Smartfind complied with maritime regulations; it also noted a non-hazardous battery, an LED locator light and a five-year battery change interval.

In September 2014 MarineLink listed the McMurdo Group’s EPIRBs, personal locator beacons and AIS man-overboard devices, including the Smartfind Plus G5 and the Fast Find 220 personal locator beacon, on show at the Newport International Boat Show in Rhode Island.

Orolia, Galileo and new owners.

In the late 2010s McMurdo was a brand of the technology group Orolia. An Orolia release dated Portsmouth, 28 February 2019, and published by Marine Industry News, presented McMurdo alongside its sister brand Kannad and announced that the McMurdo FastFind 220 and Kannad SafeLink Solo personal locator beacons now worked with Galileo, the European Union’s satellite navigation system, as well as GPS. Orolia described them as the first personal locator beacons to use Galileo and said they came out of the EU-funded Helios project that it led; it added that the McMurdo SmartFind G8 and Kannad SafePro EPIRBs were also Galileo-capable.

The SmartFind G8 was a step in the product line. In January 2017 Sail magazine described the SmartFind G8 AIS EPIRB, which sends an AIS signal to nearby AIS-equipped vessels alongside its 406 MHz satellite transmission and its 121.5 MHz homing signal, with a 72-channel receiver for the GPS, Galileo and GLONASS systems and a ten-year battery; the magazine included it in its 2017 Pittman Innovation Awards. A year earlier, at the Seawork International show in 2016, McMurdo launched the SmartFind R8F, a two-way UHF radio built to meet the SOLAS chapter II-2 radio requirements set by the International Maritime Organization in 2012, Maritime Journal reported, selling it through its partner Survitec.

Then the business changed hands. Seas of Solutions BV says it bought Orolia Maritime’s emergency readiness and response brands, McMurdo, Kannad Marine and the voyage-data-recorder maker Netwave, in April 2021, setting up Netwave Systems BV and McMurdo Ltd under its umbrella. Orolia itself was acquired by the French group Safran in 2022, according to English Wikipedia, after McMurdo had already left it, so McMurdo did not become a Safran brand.

Design and documentation.

Marine electronics and satellite-communications companies tend to present themselves through their equipment first. Their websites lead with product photographs of radars, chartplotters, sonar displays, antennas and satellite terminals, usually shown on a plain background or mounted on a mast, a wheelhouse roof or a radar arch. Domes and displays are shot from the same few angles so that a whole range reads as one family, and model names, sizes and frequency bands do much of the descriptive work.

Coverage is the second recurring image. Satellite-service providers and antenna makers publish coverage maps for each network or plan, from regional cellular zones to global satellite beams, and many now show several networks side by side as low-orbit services join older geostationary ones. Bridge and wheelhouse photography carries the human side: officers at consoles, screens glowing in a dark bridge, yachts at anchor, fishing boats and offshore vessels at work.

Airtime and connectivity plans are a large part of how these companies describe themselves. Data allowances, subscription terms, crew-internet packages and backup services are laid out in plan tables, named and grouped the way each company chooses, and a hardware maker may sell plans on its own network next to those of other operators. Network-management software, cyber security services and content for crews increasingly sit alongside the hardware.

Partner pages complete the picture. Dealer and installer networks, service points in ports, and the satellite operators and equipment makers a company works with are listed with their own names and marks. This guide describes each company’s identity from dated sources and the company’s own pages, and the colours and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations rather than reproductions of any mark.

A Dutch owner and a Portsmouth hub.

Seas of Solutions describes itself as a holding company headquartered in Zoetermeer, in the Netherlands, with a customer service and training hub in Portsmouth and a distribution centre in Baltimore, and says it has sales representatives in more than 130 countries. McMurdo sits beside Kannad Marine, which the company says has designed and made marine safety electronics since 1986, and Netwave, its voyage-data-recorder brand. The company says McMurdo and Kannad Marine beacons, transmitters and VHF radios have been part of the GMDSS requirement since it was fully implemented in 1999, and that its in-house engineering and design work is covered by ISO 9001 accreditations.

On the company’s brand page, McMurdo’s range covers four product families: EPIRBs such as the SmartFind G8 PLUS AIS EPIRB; personal locator beacons led by the FastFind 220; AIS search-and-rescue transmitters such as the SmartFind S5A; and AIS transponders in Class A and Class B versions, such as the SmartFind M6 and M12. The company also lists GMDSS radios, for the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System. It claims several firsts for its brands, among them the first compact personal locator beacon, the first AIS man-overboard device in 2012, the first AIS EPIRB in 2017 and, in March 2021, the first personal locator beacon with the Return Link Service; these are the company’s own claims.

The naming is consistent across owners. In the current listings, SmartFind covers the EPIRBs, transmitters, radios and AIS units meant for vessels, while FastFind is kept for the personal locator beacons carried by individuals, the same split that appears in the 2006 and 2014 trade reports.

For a design guide, McMurdo shows how a product brand can keep its name and its model families through several owners. Compare Jotron, a Norwegian marine electronics maker, and Inmarsat, the London satellite operator. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a beacon orange and a sea grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep McMurdo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.