Which type of Radio for mid ocean?

[alorwin]

Hi there!

Can I ask someone "in the know" what sort of radio I need to keep in contact with the world whilst mid-ocean? Am I right in thinking SSB is the one to go for, and are there different sorts of this? Can anyone advise me on which courses I need to be taking? I have a VHF with the DSC bit license, but the range on VHF is limited.

If anyone can help, I would greatly appreciate some knowledge sharing!

thanks

alorwin

 

[Deleted member 478]

You've got it right. An SSB is the answer. If you do a search on this forum for "SSB", you will find many a thread which should anwer all your questions and raise a few more issues.

 

[Anonymous]

It depends what sort of contact you want. For emergencies, you can rely on a GPS EPIRB to get attention. Before going to the expense and not inconsiderable trouble of installing and learning how to use an SSB, consider a satellite phone which can be used to call, for example, Falmouth Coastguard from anywhere in the world to make a distress call (this is perfectly proper procedure and makes a lot of sense).

SSB does give other benefits, however, and I offer this suggestion only as something to consider. I have both satellite phone and SSB (marine and ham) and use the radio a lot but seldom use the sat phone (cos I'm too tight!)

 

[npf1]

I've just got back from a trans Atlantic trip. We had SSB on board as well as a Globalstar phone. IMHO the satphone is the way to go. Why? Because I could get every bit of weather info I needed, send/receive email and speak to loved ones etc all very quickly and easily. Email and WFAX can be painful using an SSB and email is not free as you need to subscribe to a service. Also, we had to turn everything off on the boat to minimize the interference on the SSB whereas the Satphone could be used anytime. Hence when motoring, stopping for 1.5 hrs to do the SSB stuff just cost us 10 miles of progress!

The cost of the satphone was way less than an SSB and the call charges are 50p per minute. Using this with email and weather compression software meant we could exchange about 10 emails with a one minute call. Downloading the weather (synoptics and several gribs) took approx 3 minutes. The SSB was useful for talking to Herb, however just listening to Herb talking to to other boats in the vicinity would have provided almost as much info. So my view would be that if you're starting from scratch, get an SSB receiver and a satphone.

 

[Anonymous]

It shouldn't be necessary to switch off your engine and other essential services to make full use of the SSB - something isn't quite right and shouldn't be too hard to put right. I would suspect faulty earthing as the most likely cause and this could also cause problems with electrolysis so should be investigated.

Having said that, if you have satellite at a reasonable speed for 50p per minute, then it could well make sense to use that if money isn't short. We have to pay $2.5 per minute for our Mini-M so it's not an attractive proposition!

 

[ShipsWoofy]

Which telephone and service are you using?

Where did you buy the package, do you remember?

Do you pay a monthly fee on top, or is that like a pay as you go service?

Very interested!