Atlantic communications.

[Allan]

I hope to sail across the Atlantic this year. As with all things I do, it will be on a budget. I have a PLB and I am looking into SSB receivers. Are there any other ways to communicate that I should be looking into? Two way text would be fine. I just want routing information and some help with the weather.
Allan

 

[lenseman]

YellowBrick, which is what I have as a backup to the Iridium set up and SSB Tx/Rx and/or Ham HF.

http://www.yellowbrick-tracking.com/?lang=en


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[Allan]

YellowBrick, which is what I have as a backup to the Iridium set up and SSB Tx/Rx and/or Ham HF.
http://www.yellowbrick-tracking.com/?lang=en
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Many thanks, I've contacted them.
Allan

 

[lenseman]

For your wx information via Iridium, if you send the following text message to "query@saildocs.com" exactly as written between the inverted commas but NOT including the inverted commas you will get a GRIB file returned to you within a minute.

The file is about 288kBytes in size and uses very little "satellite time".

This file will give you the Atlantic weather for 4 days.

"send gfs:38N,6N,66W,7W|1,1|3,6,9,12,15,18,21,24,27,30,33,36,39,41,44,47,51,54,57,60,63,66,69,72,75,78,81,84,87,90,93,96"

and if you are really clever, you can automate it such that it will send you the Atlantic wx at 0600 UTC for 30 days (or for ever if you like). Like the Sorcerers' Apprentice, it will send it to you Ad Nauseam!

The joy of automating it means you do not use up air time sending out your request for forecast, it is there waiting for you as and when you log in to your email service.


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[Halcyon Yachts]

I hope to sail across the Atlantic this year. As with all things I do, it will be on a budget. I have a PLB and I am looking into SSB receivers. Are there any other ways to communicate that I should be looking into? Two way text would be fine. I just want routing information and some help with the weather.
Allan

We use the Isatphone (Inmarsat) for our offshore yacht deliveries: They are cheaper than Iridium for data. You can easily download gribs or text/call anyone at home. We also carry the Spot tracker, but this just offers one way communication from the yacht showing your position, so no good for forecasting.

You can buy secondhand sat phones quite easily or perhaps try and borrow/rent one?

Good luck,

Pete

 

[dk]

Rent an Iridium mobile satphone with data for email/wx. Sign up with Mailasail.

 

[Neil_Y]

I've just used ssb receivers from portable sony type to the Nasa HF3 which was easier to use/tune with a very cheap old laptop. I did have a small printer which was useful should the electronics have failed.

Really that's all you need if you want outside weather information rather than just watching the skies/seas for any changes.

The interesting thing with ocean crossing as opposed to shorter hops is that you are going to get whatever comes and unless you're sailing a 25knt cat or tri you can't do much avoiding of weather once you are out there so outside routing advice won't change much. What you do get good at, is reading the changes in weather as they happen which can also give you 12-24hrs warning of approaching weather systems. Going across it's mainly squals which you see coming (if you're lucky) as big black clouds. Coming back is more interesting and I would suggest a really good weather book is more useful.

 

[Keen_Ed]

Spot?
http://international.findmespot.com/

 

[Conachair]

I hope to sail across the Atlantic this year. As with all things I do, it will be on a budget. I have a PLB and I am looking into SSB receivers.

Search eBay for degen 1103 ssb receiver, great cheap little radios. I stopped spending money on downloading gribs after getting one, jvcomm free software works fine as well.

 

[KellysEye]

I'd go with an SSB radio they are the lifeblood of cruising: ocean nets, harbour nets, anchorage nets, weather broadcasts, weather faxes and chatting to other boats, no satphone or Inmarsat kit can do all of that. We did however carry a satphone in the grab bag, emergency calls are free.

 

[Allan]

I'd go with an SSB radio they are the lifeblood of cruising: ocean nets, harbour nets, anchorage nets, weather broadcasts, weather faxes and chatting to other boats, no satphone or Inmarsat kit can do all of that. We did however carry a satphone in the grab bag, emergency calls are free.

I've been a bit busy today but plan to look into what licences are needed to talk on SSB. I've heard that most people use their boat name as a callsign but I thought you would need one like the HAM guys. My plan, at present, is just to receive on SSB, as mentioned above. I've just got my commercial Yachtmaster, the thought of studying for a HAM license does not appeal.
Allan

 

[wotayottie]

Allan

Have a word with John who sails with Phil on Moontide out of CYC. He is a radio ham and will give you lots of good practical advice on SSB

But whether you chose sat phone or SSB or both, dont rely on SSB for help in emergency. It simply isnt good enough and there are far better alternatives.

Are you going with fellow CYC members?

 

[SteveSarabande]

I've been a bit busy today but plan to look into what licences are needed to talk on SSB. I've heard that most people use their boat name as a callsign but I thought you would need one like the HAM guys. My plan, at present, is just to receive on SSB, as mentioned above. I've just got my commercial Yachtmaster, the thought of studying for a HAM license does not appeal.
Allan

SSB and HAM are going to be expensive. The kit to be able to transmit is expansive, and fitting it to a boat makes it worse. Far easier for a one off trip to use a satphone.

To transmit on Marine SSB you need a Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS) Long Range Certificate, they do courses here at £490
http://www.yachtcom.co.uk/Courses/lrc.html

 

[prv]

I've been a bit busy today but plan to look into what licences are needed to talk on SSB. I've heard that most people use their boat name as a callsign but I thought you would need one like the HAM guys.

To use marine SSB (as opposed to Ham) the UK regime is basically the same one as for marine VHF. You update your existing ship station license online to say you now have HF radio on board, and you do the course to get the operator's ticket. I don't have it, but I'm guessing it's a bit more involved than the noddy VHF one. Couple of days? The magic words are (or used to be) "Long Range Certificate".

You should already have a callsign on your ship station license - it's the same whichever radio you happen to be talking on. Don't know whether you can use your vessel name as an alternative as you can on VHF, but it seems plausible.

Confusion may arise because the US doesn't demand any courses or certificates of competence of its leisure sailors, so they just buy the kit, fill in a free form or two, and crack on.

Pete

 

[prv]

SSB and HAM are going to be expensive. The kit to be able to transmit is expansive, and fitting it to a boat makes it worse. Far easier for a one off trip to use a satphone.

+1

A lot of aspects of HF radio rather appeal to me, so I probably would fit it if doing a trip like this. But if you just want a practical means of communication for one voyage, I'd be inclined to agree with Steve here.

Pete

 

[SteveSarabande]

+1

A lot of aspects of HF radio rather appeal to me, so I probably would fit it if doing a trip like this. But if you just want a practical means of communication for one voyage, I'd be inclined to agree with Steve here.

Pete

I have just reclaimed my HAM licence from many years ago. I agree as a hobby it would be great on board, and for long term cruising the Marine SSB is the way to go.

For a one off atlantic trip a satphone and an SSB radio attached to your laptop is probably all you need
This looks like a simple setup for weatherfax for £130
http://www.sailcom.co.uk/receivers/index.html#wx

 

[Conachair]

I have just reclaimed my HAM licence from many years ago. I agree as a hobby it would be great on board, and for long term cruising the Marine SSB is the way to go.

For a one off atlantic trip a satphone and an SSB radio attached to your laptop is probably all you need
This looks like a simple setup for weatherfax for £130
http://www.sailcom.co.uk/receivers/index.html#wx

+1.

I've gone the ham route (and don't regret it at all) after using a sat phone but for a one off across the atlantic and back I think it would be hard to justify fitting either a ham or ssb rig.

 

[Uricanejack]

I used to have a restricted wireless telephony cert isued by the GPO back in the day.
Meant I could use short wave in addition to VHF. We actualy had one on the boat when my uncle aquired it. We also had a fax with great big crystals for each station, took up loads of space ended up in a skip.

But I thought this had gone the way of the Dodo. I had hear all the coast stations which could recive on the 500Khz and 2182Khz had closed.

I thoght GMDSS was all satlite nowadays. Though I have the VHF version. I have to say I nearly chewed my arm off to get out of the class it was so dull. Cant remember a dam thing.

Just curious what is avalable. and who is listening?

 

[Conachair]

Just curious what is avalable. and who is listening?

GMDSS is built in to newer marine SSB radios.. http://www.yachtcom.info/MarineSSB/index.html

Both the ham bands and marine SSB bands have a load of sailing nets set up.

http://www.cruiser.co.za/radionet.asp

And with both you can send / recieve short emails pretty much anywhere. Not sure about the marine SSB side but with Ham I get it for free, radio plugged into the laptop soundcard.
Not sure about the marine SSB side but the ham bands are busy worldwide. I spoke to a guy on Jan Mayen Island the other day, and listened to a guy sailing up the coast of Germany.

Plenty going on and all good fun, I'm just looking forward to getting back to a nice anchorage somewhere to get a better signal than the marina.

 

[MailASail]

Stop, Look, Listen, React?

Hi, Good luck with your trip. Note, there is some contrary advice flying around here, if I could just try and help you look at the big picture for a moment and also try and put some of the suggestions here into context:

- SSB radio is an excellent system for ship to ship communication. Also with a bit of extra equipment you can send very limited text only emails via radio, but it relies on the goodwill of some external party on shore who will pickup your transmission and relay it to the internet. A very popular such service would be SailMail and they have an excellent "quickstart" guide on their website called "The SailMail Primer" which gives you a summary of what is involved (it runs to a little over 200 pages). Hand waving you are looking at around £4-6K for a system including setup, installation and training.

- Satellite Phones are another alternative, they are best used for ship to shore (notice how really this is a complementary need to radio, which is most ideal for ship to ship - so arguably you desire both types of system). Most popular is the Iridium handheld and Pilot systems, but also there is the Inmarsat FleetBroadband (and larger systems). Generally simpler to setup and more capable for email, eg systems such as the Iridium Pilot give you "low 3G speeds" for "roaming mobile phone" kinds of prices. Budget £700-1,500 for an Iridium basic system, £3,499 for an Iridium pilot

- Dedicated messaging and tracking devices. Generally very much more limited devices that can be seen as more "SMS" kinds of systems. Often with built in tracking services. Largely the market is either where you need to get as cheap as possible (eg Globalstar SPOT), or where you want a self contained, single purpose tracking system with a battery and no wires which can be cut (eg for race tracking) such as the Yellow Brick. Generally any messaging on such devices will be limited and extremely expensive by the standards of normal emails. Yellow Brick's £500 model seems the most popular, SPOT comes from £100 ish. Note that SPOT is a "best efforts tracking system", ie it works "most of the time".

The above is basically your complete list of options, perhaps bar carrier pidgeon?

Note: Someone mentioned that they thought ISatphone Pro was "cheaper". Beware that we have seen a bunch of people try and save money this route last year and it seems a largely unsatisfactory system in practice. The device is somewhat tricky to setup for data, but the biggest problem is that it's around half the speed of an Iridium to download data. So although it looks slightly cheaper to buy, those saving almost instantly disappear in additional running costs (also we see they generally have a low satisfaction for speed, ie Iridium is considered slow, but ISatphone at half the speed seems to quickly dip below the level where people can be bothered to keep using it and it becomes an "emergency only" device)


*I* deal mainly with satellite phones such as the Iridium, so focusing on that for a moment. They can be extremely satisfactory for simple requirements such as messaging, emails, weather and they are excellent for emergency distress calling (Falmouth recently put out a statement implying that they feel all offshore boats should carry a satellite phone...). However, they are limited by the standards of home broadband and it's important to be clear on this and that *you* adapt to work within its limitations to be happy.

eg I think it might have been a typo, but someone suggested that you might want to download a 288KB grib file - given you get around 20KB/min over Iridium, this is more than a 15 minute phone call - nothing wrong with that, but MY recommendation would be to stick much smaller, eg around the 50-100KB kind of sizing. Also if you use an optimising email service then there is no need for sending text messages in advance, simply order GRIB data as you need it and get it back instantly (Zygrib/UGrib or our own MailASail teleport-weather download service are all examples of how you could do this)


So, ideally:

- Buy an SSB *and* a satellite phone if you have the budget. Use each for it's strengths

- If you can only purchase one then I might argue (and others would argue against) that a satellite phone has lower upfront cost and high resale value and factoring in a running cost of £40/month or so (about our customer average) then it's total cost is probably lower than the total cost of an SSB set. However, they excel in different areas, so more important is what you will use it for

- For most people a tracking system such as a SPOT or Yellow Brick is an "also" item to some proper long range communication solution such as a satellite phone or radio. Please don't carry it as your only device

- Please don't see the satellite phones as "only for oceans". Falmouth recommend that all offshore yachts should now carry one, and although we mainly sell to people doing longer trips, we find those customers still use them alongside their Wifi and 3G solutions near land - at the end of the day use the cheapest, but 3G/Wifi isn't universally available, just "nearly everywhere".

- In the satellite systems, the system with highest satisfaction value at present is the Iridium Pilot. It's the most expensive at around £3,499, but there is no monthly running costs, it's almost fast enough for web browsing, priced decently enough that you can use it for email and even focussed web browsing, and its the simplest setup to use (looks like home broadband, just plug in a network cable). Last year it moved from 0% to around 20% of our systems sold, so still in the minority, but increasing in popularity very quickly


Good luck with your trip whatever you choose. Obviously feel free to ask questions if I can help (I'm trying to be fairly down the line here, but I'm sure some bias will creep in...)