Topband: Maritime gear programmable on ham bands?

[Tom W8JI]

>A fellow ham once was on a trip  from Spain to the Caribbean on a sailing 
>boat. For comms with me and some friends he was using a FT-900, and as a 
>backup rig he could have used the onboard Icom marine radio, in case his 
>Yaesu failed. He is not a techie, so i think modifying the Icom was rather 
>easy. Why should it be any harder than 'opening up' ham gear , e.g. cut out 
>diodes?

Because commercial gear requires a different certification process that is 
supposed to prevent easy modification for use outside of type certification, 
and because Ham transceivers do not require that unless they operate on 27 
MHz.

If they were built to the letter of the law the simple programming change 
would not be available.

Of course this would not stop Ham gear from being converted to marine.