Emergency response teams at the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada coast guard picked up a distress call on 26 February from the Ellora, a fishing trawler registered in Peterhead, north-east Scotland.
They quickly alerted Aberdeen whose team contacted the skipper and learned that the EPIRB was not in use and was activated by mistake.
The signal goes to a satellite on its first pulse and is quite often passed around the world.
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