Mobile signal vs Iridium Go vs ISathub in the Outer Hebrides

I was there for three weeks recently travelling between Barra and Stornoway. Excellent VHF reception of Stornoway CG forecasts throughout.

I am on the O2 network. Access to simple calls in the Outer Isles very patchy, access to data services poor to non-existent. In my opinion the ability to download Met Office inshore waters forecasts to a phone is now far inferior to the position 5 years ago.
 
dovekie said:
Thank you all, very much, the consideration given to questions on this forum always impresses me.

Point taken about using LW radio shipping forecasts and the Coastguard. We use the former diligently, usually the 05:25 in the summer. My musing on satellite was in particular in relation to forecasts a week ahead, GRIBs and possible (vaguely possible) fair weather planning for St Kilda or N Rona. We happen to have EE / T-mobile and Vodafone Sims which addresses some of the patchy coverage.

Thank you too for references to Delorme Inreach / 9555 / ZTE MF60 and Huawei E8377 all of which I shall now research.

Jon
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Ive got an app called " IGrib' that seems to work well round here. Easy to use and seems accurate
 
:confused: are you suggesting the data speed has dropped or coverage gone? That seems unlikely, more likely your expectations have increased.
 
Quote "In my opinion the ability to download Met Office inshore waters forecasts to a phone is now far inferior to the position 5 years ago."

I agree with that, I've been cruising the West Coast of Scotland for 10 years now and has becomes a lot more difficult to download forecast from the internet.

I think that there are multiple problems which cause this degradation in service:

1) The applications, particularly the met office app, are now so blotted they require a lot of data just to get started, they time out on 2G (GPRS), too many graphics, too many adds. I've concluded that the met office app is more or less useless if you don't have 3 or 4 G. XCweather, use to be OK, but the re-vamped the site about a year ago, and it now times out on 2G. It's not quite as bad as the met office app but here are limited location where I can get a forecast. WIndguru seems to require less bandwidth than most weather apps, so that's the one I use, most of the time.

2) There are a lot more people using the network and it becomes over loaded, this is particularly noticeable in the evening, 7 to 9pm, when people are phoning home. in many location XCweather will ok early in the morning or late at night, but times out in the evening.

3) The internet backbone, to which the mobile connects, has very limited capacity, my phone will often report that I'm online, but I can download anything. The Government and BT openreach need to get their finger out and put good quality broad band in to some of the remoter spots, It may help the continuing depopulation of the islands, as well as providing yachties with a good internet connection.

4) The apps on my smart phone want to connect to the world as soon as it is connect the the world wide web. With 2G (GPRS) the bandwidth is so poor that low priority applications just don't get look in.

5) Mobile phones are now less optimised as phones and are now optimised as "personal assistant" doing virtually everything but make the tea. My old Nokia brick was a much better phone than my current Samsung Galaxy.

And as final comment to this rant, the met office forecast, as transmitted on VHF by the coastguard, is so general that it only gives you a vague idea of what the weather might be and is often wrong. For example we did a night sail from Isle Oransay (Isle of Sky) to Tobermory. the met office was forecasting, S going SW, 5 to 6 occasionally 7, however, we could clearly see on Windguru, a lull from about 7pm through to the early hours of the following morning. We set off at about 6:30pm in a SSW 4 to 5 and finished up motoring into Tobermory in flat calm. If I'd had to relied on the inshore waters forecast, I probably wouldn't have sailed.

The reason I get heated about access to forecast on the West Coast of Scotland is simple, good quality forecast ,for the week ahead are readily available to anyone with an internet connection, OK the timing of changes in the weather a week ahead is likely to change, but if it shows a gale coming through, you know it's likely to windy in a weeks time and you can plan accordingly. It makes sailing the West Coast of Scotland much safer and more enjoyable. It wouldn't take very much in the way of money and resources to make this happen, and it would improve safety and make a big difference to economics of remote settlements
 
I find that navtex provides just about enough information between the Inshore Forecast and the Extended Outlook.
Derek
 
Yes, quite so. Perhaps my expectations are too high but I imagine that downloading the simple Met Office forecasts for Mull of Kintyre to Ardnamurchan or Ardnamurchan to Cape Wrath involves data volumes similar now to those of 5 years ago. Then, the ease of access seemed miraculous - if I had a phone signal of any strength i could download a forecast albeit sometimes slowly .

Now my phone regularly tells me I have 3G or 4G and yet even with this supposed signal the forecasts are inaccessible off NW Scotland 90% of the time.

Sounds like a campaign for the Cruising Association.....
 
Ian interesting observations, and you certainly make some valid points. Sail Grib or a similar app may be a better option for getting just the actual data with none of the fluff. On an iPhone you can easily turn on and off access to the network for each app (and set it so some apps only use wifi etc) that should mean you don't have your other apps hogging your own bandwidth. I can't recall if the SG range have similar but you'd think if not then there will be a third party app to do that - many teenagers who would like to use their data allowance carefully, even more so for roaming!

The answer may well not be to use an app at all. a bookmarked browser page may use less data than an app. That's presumably what you did pre-smartphone.

Are there still services that send the forecast by SMS?
 
The met office web site is now hopeless for use in low bandwidth locations. But if you bookmark the text only version of the Inshore Waters forecast it is very data efficient
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/marine-inshore-waters-printable

We have been able to get this small bit of data in 90% of the places we have been in the Outer Hebrides, Orkneys etc.
Certainly never got up at 0530 to listen to a forecast, and usually got this text version before needing to listen to a VHF one.
Pre bookmarked XC is also pretty data efficient
 
For a small area forecast, then if you were to use a Grib viewing app such as Pocket Grib, then the data for an area covering say the Hebrides and the mainland would be about 120kb: and that's for an 8 day forecast of the GFS model. Should be easy enough to download this even if the coverage is only GPRS.
You can view the data offline and by setting the display to use the offline map you don't need a data connection at all except to refresh the data.
 
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