Yellow Brick

That looks like quite a useful bit of kit - cheaper than going for a full Satphone, though you can only communicate by text not voice. Can't remember what the text costs were for my Iridium, but I suspect a little more than this. I like the feature of the battery lasting so long, and it would be a handy item to have in your pocket if you had to abandon ship. If I didn't already have an Iridium, I'd certainly have one of these....
 
Cookee said:
Have a look at the Spot Connect - it pairs with your phone for sending messages.
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But the SPOT tends to work only near large land masses as it is on the Globalstar network, although from my experience it works all the way from Plymouth to Newport and Plymouth to Praia.

Yellow Brick because it works off Inmarsat has world wide coverage. That is what I really want.

No it won't do GRIB files. You'll need Duncan's satphone for that.
 
Glayva said:
But the SPOT tends to work only near large land masses as it is on the Globalstar network, although from my experience it works all the way from Plymouth to Newport and Plymouth to Praia.

Yellow Brick because it works off Inmarsat has world wide coverage. That is what I really want.

No it won't do GRIB files. You'll need Duncan's satphone for that.
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If you can send/receive email ten you can get GRIBs. See http://weather.mailasail.com/Franks-Weather/Saildocs-Free-Grib-Files. Saildocs was designed for use over email.
 
franksingleton said:
If you can send/receive email ten you can get GRIBs. See http://weather.mailasail.com/Franks-Weather/Saildocs-Free-Grib-Files. Saildocs was designed for use over email.
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It was interesting at the Jester Challenge seminar how poorly thought of GRIB files were. My only experience of them is in the Pacific. But it was interesting to hear from those who had used them in the North Atlantic that they were equally useless.

It was agreed that reading your own weather from the local conditions was a much better indication of what was going to arrive.

My experience of mailasail is very negative as they require you to have only the latest operating systems which does not suit the price of equipment that those who require on board equipment may be prepared to pay for something that is likely to be destroyed by salt water in very short order.
 
Glayva said:
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My experience of mailasail is very negative as they require you to have only the latest operating systems which does not suit the price of equipment that those who require on board equipment may be prepared to pay for something that is likely to be destroyed by salt water in very short order.
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If you are talking about fairly small detail over the next few hours, I totally agree with you. What you can see coupled with experience will give better results – probably helped by whatever forecast you can get hold of. There are small scale weather features that are simply unpredictable except in the most general terms.

If you are talking about the next few days then I have met nobody who would agree with you. I am not a blue water sailor but I know and have met and had contact with several who are including RTW racers. Also, I have met transatlantic sailors who say that GRIBs outperformed the much lauded Herb. I use GRIBs all the time when cruising and find that, often, I get good guidance out to about 6 or 7 days ahead. Not guaranteed, there is no such animal as a perfect forecast system. Over my time in the Med, I saw a significant improvement in the prediction of Mistrals. In 2000, we were getting 4 days warning of Mistrals. In 2009, when we were last in the Balearics, we were getting warning of mistrals 6 days ahead.

My technique is to look at GRIBs out to 8 days every day. I look for consistency from one day to the next. I try to see if the 8 day forecast on one day is saying the same as the 7 day forecast on the next, and the 6 day forecast on the next day after that and the 5 day forecast on the next.. If so, then you will be pretty sure that the next 5 days will be as the forecast – in general terms. Not and never the detail. If the 8, 7, 6 day forecasts are inconsistent, as they will be sometimes, then the forecast for the next few day may be uncertain.

I will draw your comment on MailASail to ED Wildgoose. That does not affect the value of GRIBs, however you get them.
 
Glayva said:
My experience of mailasail is very negative as they require you to have only the latest operating systems which does not suit the price of equipment that those who require on board equipment may be prepared to pay for something that is likely to be destroyed by salt water in very short order.
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Although it's your perogative whether to critique us or not, I think you should be extremely clear about the definition of your criticism because others might be misled by your words

For example we intended to support all versions of windows from Win95 onwards, ie computers up to 17 odd years old. However, due to some accident it appears our *most recent* software build currently only runs on XP onwards (although if someone really were to find that a problem we can probably get the older code out and you are then good back to Win95 again).

I think it's misleading to say that not supporting Windows 3 from back in the early 1990s DOS days is "requiring the latest operating systems".... If that is truly what you mean then please be very clear, because we find that 99% of Windows customers are on XP or Win7, with a smattering of Vista and Win8 (which all work out of the box)

Please consider editing your post to reflect the facts of your claim?

Thanks

Ed W

P.S. We also support Apple Mac and Linux and have several linux customers on the ARC this year. Also we make a wireless adaptor for sat phones, so anything with wifi can use the Iridium with compressed optimised messaging. So we support almost every device you can really think of... I think you are very unfair to describe this as "only the latest"... Just my 2p...
 
jesterchallenger said:
That looks like quite a useful bit of kit - cheaper than going for a full Satphone, though you can only communicate by text not voice. Can't remember what the text costs were for my Iridium, but I suspect a little more than this.
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The Iridium 9555 costs around £799+vat, (yellow brick is approx £500) it's really not much cheaper than a full Iridium which gives you the advantage of voice calls (which are really the only properly useful solution for distress)

SMS messages on the Yellow brick cost circa $0.70 each, and they are around $0.50 via Iridium. Therefore I would suggest that the full Iridium is cheaper for SMS?

For email beware that the cost is £0.10 ish, for 50 characters of email. So that works out as perhaps £20 for a small 10KB email.


Remember if you buy a the larger 9575 then you can have position tracking built into the phone and the monthly costs are potentially much lower than using a yellow brick.


jesterchallenger said:
I like the feature of the battery lasting so long, and it would be a handy item to have in your pocket if you had to abandon ship. If I didn't already have an Iridium, I'd certainly have one of these....
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Sure, but our experience (which is backed up by the recent announcement from Falmouth) that having a satellite voice terminal makes distress reporting *SO* much better than buttons or alerting devices like EPIRBS, Yellow Bricks, etc. (I'm NOT saying not to carry EPIRBS, etc, only that if you have a voice form of communication, that it's even better)

Our experience (and we have 1-3 customers a year get off their boats mid ocean) is that with a voice system, it's extremely rare to hit the life raft. The whole situation evolves differently because there is very low inhibition to pickup a phone and talk to someone *well before* things get urgent. So we see people typically talking and managing the situation and it becoming an emergency is usually after support is well informed of the situations. I only have one life-raft example and that was a galley explosion...

Just my 2p
 
MailASail said:
For email beware that the cost is £0.10 ish, for 50 characters of email. So that works out as perhaps £20 for a small 10KB email.
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Is this for Iridium or Yellow Brick?

I found that the number of characters for an SMS from a sat phone was restrictive. I really missed proper email, and getting a better idea of weather. When resorting to the voice I found it regularly dropped out, and the bill when I got home was a shock (presumably because of this).

£10 for 10KB seems a lot. Zygrib files with limited information and limited area might be a bit under 100KB - am I missing something?
 
franksingleton said:
If you are talking about fairly small detail over the next few hours, I totally agree with you. What you can see coupled with experience will give better results – probably helped by whatever forecast you can get hold of. There are small scale weather features that are simply unpredictable except in the most general terms.
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I am talking about day after day of GRIB files saying the wind would be Southerly but in fact we had constant Easterlies. The GRIB files also ignored a F8 depression that was with us for 3 days. I don't consider those small details.
 
MailASail said:
Although it's your perogative whether to critique us or not, I think you should be extremely clear about the definition of your criticism because others might be misled by your words

For example we intended to support all versions of windows from Win95 onwards, ie computers up to 17 odd years old. However, due to some accident it appears our *most recent* software build currently only runs on XP onwards (although if someone really were to find that a problem we can probably get the older code out and you are then good back to Win95 again).
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I am talking about Windows 2000 which because of the US Military favouring it was supported for longer after it was obsolescent by Microsoft. I was running Windows 2000 on a General Dynamics Itronix which as it has a gel filled interior is relatively waterproof but not upgradeable.

I spent an hour on a very expensive phone call to a support person at Mailasail who basically told me to get a decent computer if I wanted to run your software. I was not impressed at all.
 
This on the Yachting Monthly Scuttlebutt forum is illustrative of how bad GRIB files are:

ParaHandy said:
It's peeing down here and I've nothing better to do than compare the Sandettie Light ship actual wind data with the Grib predictions. The error's worryingly big and I'm sure was never this bad 8 years ago when similarily stuck for something to do.

They issue these things every 6 hours (from NOAAA?) about 5 hours after the forecast date; so the first Grib file might be for 0600 and you get this at 11 so the blighters have at least got the chance to look out the window and check they've got one Grib right ...

Seriously, I don't recall it ever being as bad as this?
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And unless ParaHandy is talking about a different Sandette Light Vessel, I put it in the the Dover Straight which is somewhere you would expect forecasts to be correct.
 
MailASail said:
For email beware that the cost is £0.10 ish, for 50 characters of email. So that works out as perhaps £20 for a small 10KB email.

Remember if you buy a the larger 9575 then you can have position tracking built into the phone and the monthly costs are potentially much lower than using a yellow brick.
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Just seen this, and thought I should clarify.

With Yellowbrick you pay a monthly line rental (which is £8 per month) and you only pay for the months you wish to use the unit. Thus, if you're cruising for 3 months of the year, you simply pay 3 x £8. The rest of the year, you don't need to pay line rental - no annual contracts.

Second, credits (which are used for position reports, and messages) cost between £0.05 and £0.12, depending how many you buy in a pack. Credits don't expire, and a Yellowbrick uses 1 credit per position report, or 50 characters of a message.

Certainly you can use a satphone like a 9575 for tracking, but we would suggest sticking to using the right tool for the right job. A satphone for, well, phone calls - an EPIRB for emergency situations (perhaps coupled with another form of comms), and a tracker for tracking (and perhaps a bit of messaging).

The Yellowbrick is designed for tracking first, and email/SMS/messaging (think small text-based messages) second. It's designed to stick on the back of your boat, and you can then forget about it for a couple of months whilst it pings your position away every hour (or whatever you tell it to do). You can't really do that with a satphone, nor would you want to.
 
Glayva said:
I am talking about day after day of GRIB files saying the wind would be Southerly but in fact we had constant Easterlies. The GRIB files also ignored a F8 depression that was with us for 3 days. I don't consider those small details.
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It seems that your experience does not tally with mine nor those of many others, blue water and coastal sailors, with whom I have had contact.

If anyone really doubts that GRIB files can help then do a test. Take an 8 day forecast, then compare each day, ie D + 8, D + 7, D + 6, etc with the T=0 for that day. Do that a few times. I have done this for talks, just starting on a random day. The results are usually pretty good. See http://weather.mailasail.com/Franks-Weather/Grib-Forecast-Examples.

There is nothing better with the current state of the science. If we could get GRIBs from ECMWF or the UK Met Office then we might get slightly better results on average.
 
franksingleton said:
It seems that your experience does not tally with mine nor those of many others, blue water and coastal sailors, with whom I have had contact.
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I think you might be talking to the wrong sailors. I was really interested to hear the accumulated experience of the Jester Challengers and the Jester Azores Challengers indicated that GRIB files were generally inaccurate, which has also been my experience. Albeit my GRIB file experience has only been in the Pacific not the North Atlantic.

I should add that 'Triple Venture' mentioned that Weatherfax which produces synoptic charts and are aided by human interpretation were quite reliable. Tony has a dedicated Weatherfax machine and someone else mentioned they had tried to download Weatherfax to their computer but unfortunately found it incredibly slow as it scanned each line.
 
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