Cloaking fields and the treaty compliance checklist

We sell the CFM-2 to survey operators, salvage crews and research vessels. We sell it with a compliance dossier, and I want to explain why that dossier is not a formality.

The short version

Article 14 governs refraction field systems across the signatory jurisdictions. It does not prohibit them. It prohibits specific configurations and specific uses, and it requires notification for others. The distinction between a legal survey cloak and a serious offence is usually a matter of configuration and paperwork, not of hardware.

The checklist

Before purchase

• Confirm your operating jurisdiction is among the fourteen where civil operation is permitted.
• Confirm your vessel class is eligible. Several jurisdictions permit research and survey hulls and prohibit commercial freight, regardless of intent.
• Hold a current licence before you take delivery. We cannot ship against a pending application.

At installation

• Verify the weapons interlock is intact and functional. This is a hard-wired board-level interlock; if an installer offers to bypass it, end the engagement and tell us.
• Complete the hull survey. An unsurveyed installation produces a visible field seam, which is both a performance problem and, in two jurisdictions, evidence of an unregistered modification.
• File the installation notification within thirty standard days.

In operation

• Log every engagement: time, duration, position, purpose. Most jurisdictions require the log on request; all of them treat a missing log badly.
• Do not engage inside a controlled traffic zone without prior notification. This is the single most common violation and it is almost always inadvertent.
• Drop the field on hail. Always. Failure to answer while cloaked is what escalates an administrative matter into an enforcement one.

Annually

• Re-verify the interlock and file the certification.
• Confirm your licence still covers your current operating region. Regions change; licences do not follow.

Why we refuse some orders

We decline roughly one order in six. The usual reasons are an operating region outside the fourteen, a vessel class that is not eligible, or a request to modify the interlock. That last category we report, because Article 14 requires us to and because the alternative is being the company whose hardware turns up somewhere it should not.

This costs us revenue. It also means our customers can operate a cloak openly, with paperwork that survives an inspection — which is the entire product, in a way the specification sheet does not capture.

If you are unsure

Ask us before you order. Compliance questions cost nothing and we would rather answer forty of them than process one return from a jurisdiction where the unit should never have been shipped.