Best weather fax. for Med and worlwide.

[mocruising]

Now that I have established that its none too straight forward to use Marine Band SSB and lap top to rx weather data. Can we have some experience on dedicated units which are the most simple to use and give the best results, and how wide is the coverage.

 

[allanc]

But it is easy to get weather fax via an SSB onto your Laptop: Connect a coax from your SSB aerial socket to the boat's backstay. For reception only you don't need any fancy insulators, just clip it to the chainplate.
Buy a copy of Meteoscan, follow the instructions to the letter and install it on your laptop (XP, Not Vista). Buy an audio cable from a computer shop. connect the SSB audio output (green) direct to the microphone input (red) on your laptop.
Select Meteoscan on your laptop, let it open, select FAX.
Set the SSB frequency to 4608 ( there are others, you will learn much more by exploring Frank Singleton's site) and the BFO switch to on, watch the tuning graph on the top right of the screen adjusting it by the USB/LSB knob (Meteoscan instructions will have told you how to do this), click Manual start and watch the screen fill slowly with weather synoptics - free. You can use this to also receive RTTY.
For Navtex - buy a Nasa Navtex Pro.
Good luck and don't be put off by anyone who says it's difficult, really, if I can do it, you can!
Allan

 

[whipper_snapper]

The problem is that you asked the wrong question the first time!

For navtex it is pointless, for fax and RTTY it is easy and useful - as others have said.

 

[jennymckay]

Like allanc says, the laptop connection is easy and we've used it for many years.
2 comments to make here - synoptic charts and large scale forecasts don't work too well in the Med (neither do Barometers!), plus whenever you have internet access, go to http://www.windguru.cz for the most accurate forecast you're likely to get. It's worldwide, free and uncannily accurate.
Jen

 

[tudorsailor]

Have you looked at movingweather.com. It is pretty cheap to buy and the download is small size. I used a mobile with a spanish sim and then GPRS to download the local weather 5 day forecast for lamost nothing. Grear when out of wireless range

TudorDoc

 

[jerryat]

From MANY years of use in the Med. UK and Caribbean, and having tried Meteoscan and others, the best we have used is JVComm32 - and the free version at that! True you get a couple of lines saying 'demo' down the fax, but this in no way inhibits its use. The cost of the full version is only about £40? so not a lot if you want to have a blemish-free fax.

However, whilst you can get good RTTY with the JV programme, we use it for wefaxes only and nothing else.

For RTTY, by far the best software we've come across, and again it's completely free to download, is MMTTY. Just Google for a selection of sites to download from. This is exclusively for RTTY and allows full screen display with colours for font and background of your choice. This doesn't sound particularly special, but believe me, when your eyes are tired or it's the middle of the night, having a bright yellow background with black text is a dream!

Of course everyone has their personal favourite vis a vis software, but the two above are at least very well worth a try. The JV can be a bit tricky to configure initally if you are not used to this type of SW, but if you do try it, and have a problem, PM me and I'll try and help out.

Connection to your laptop BTW is simplicity itself. A 3.5 MONO plug from your HF radio to a 3.5 mono plug into the microphone input on your laptop. Yes I know the usual connection to the laptop is a stereo plug, but the mono has always worked on our (two) laptops without any problem.

Final point that you may already know. Do not try to download wefax/RTTY whilst running your laptop via an inverter. The interference generated will wipe out any chance of a readable signal. Either use a DC-DC adapter or use the laptop on batteries alone. The latter is perfectly acceptable timewise as, even on our Atlantic circuits, we seldom downloaded more than five wefaxes a day averaging circa 12-15 mins each.

Just a personal viewpoint of course, but hope it helps! /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[Gypsy]

I think the others are painting the picture well.
For Navtex, and yes it IS useful, use a dedicated Rx. I used a Nav6+ but there are others. The key is to find low power consumption and memory based, older paper units require too much supervision. The further you go from Europe Navtex will be less useful.

For other weather such as TTY or GRIB files your SSB with an appropriate PC software package is the answer. I used MeteoScan for TTY and my cellfone for GRIB. In Greece and Turkey there are very good websites with localised info from their own weather people. PM or e-mail me if you need the URL's.
Ray

 

[davidbains]

We'd all be interested in those URL's!!

 

[Gypsy]

Yes, sorry, didn't mean to be secretive.
These 3 links are to the state weather services. I like the visual displays for wind patterns using colour and animated across a few forecast periods in the Poseidon and the wind section of the Turkish sites. I have added Croatia too but the visual presentation is different.

As always, local factors where there are many islands means the detail will not necessarily give you the local picture but they really do help you get to see what is expected overall.

Croatia: http://meteo.hr/index_en.php

Greece: http://www.poseidon.ncmr.gr/weather_forecast.html

Turkey: http://www.meteoroloji.gov.tr/2006/english/eng-sea24hoursmap.aspx

The Turkish site has more detail now than when I first used it 4 years ago and the "Marina Forcasts" look quite useful for more localised info.

These are not new to the forum but a good reminder and recommendation from personal use.

Croatia Greece Turkey

Ray

 

[davidbains]

The Turkish site is impressive, thanks.

 

[ColinR]

hello, I just spotted this post and as I have never suceeded in getting a weatherfax using JVcomm32 on my laptop (vista) connected to a Nasa HF3 radio I wondered if you could give any advice? The set up all seems to work ok, the spectrum viewer shows the sound signal etc. I wondered if I have not configured it properly, but I am a bit baffled by the instructions. Also I am never sure which of the various frequencies for Northwood or Offenbach are best. Thanks for any help. Colin

 

[Gypsy]

Hello Colin, I also had problems with getting the weather FAX over SSB. I only had a consumer Sony radio which provided SSB reception adequate for the TTY signals from the Hamburg forecast. I did experiment with the SSB fax but the reception I had made it too unreliable to bother with. There have been many posters over the years who claim they regularly use SSB fax but I sense they were using better HF/SSB rigs and were out in the open ocean. My use was for the Med and mostly trying to Rx whilst in port or at anchor to plan ahead but the reception was often compromised by the location. I found the GRIB files via e-mail were very useful. I used my cellphone initially only 9.6kb GSM then 48kb GPRS for e-mail. Only good near land but that is where I had the SSB problems.
Sorry I have no magic for you.