Ocean Navigator Communications Newsletter #12

Four Phones, Three Radios, Two Laptops, (And A Partridge In A Pear Tree?)

In the last issue of the communications newsletter my colleague, Tim Hasson, treated you to some details about our recent long distance communications trials. Here's my side of the story. I was sailing on a 47' ketch on the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal between La Coruna and Lisbon. Between the boat's installed gear, and what I brought along in my bag of goodies, we had between us: two Panasonic Toughbook laptop computers, one Thrane & Thrane 3064A Inmarsat Mini-M, one Thrane & Thrane 3022D Inmarsat C, one Iridium 9505 phone with data kit, one SEA 235 single sideband radio, two GSM mobile phones, one rather useless SprintPCS (CDMA) mobile phone, and of course the good old VHF - an Icom M45 fixed mount and a handheld Standard Horizon Hx460S that I brought along.

Here's how things wound up shaking out: both computers worked flawlessly, though the slower one did have some trouble when asked to display scads of weather data in Nobeltec's Visual Navigation Suite. The Inmarsat Mini-M phone also worked flawlessly. We had a little bit of confusion for the first couple of days as we were in the process of switching from one airtime provider to another and had some trouble coordinating the different PIN numbers we needed to unlock the unit and then the SIM card. Once this was sorted out with a couple of (toll-free) calls to the provider's helpline, the phone was one of the most reliable pieces of equipment onboard. Though we hardly used it for voice calls, it did more than its fair share of once or twice daily data calls to check the boat's primary email account. In one rather extreme example, we tried to download a file that was over a megabyte in size. While the phone held the connection for over an hour and a half (at about $2.50 per minute!), the server we were downloading from eventually got tired of dealing with our request on such a slow connection and finally stopped responding. In this case, a download manager would be worth any price in order to be able to pick up the download from where we'd left off rather than having to start again. (As it turned out, in searching for an errant part we discovered a CD that had been put on the boat with just the file we were looking for and so we didn't have to worry about the download after all.)

The Inmarsat C had a few problems. Normally one of the most rock-solid modes of communications, this would be the inaugural season for the unit and there had been problems with the installation. The unit would sporadically lock onto a signal and hold it for a few hours, and then lose it again and alert us with a beeping alarm that we'd first discovered in the middle of the night - fumbling around with flashlights at the navstation trying desperately not to wake up the other crew. Of course - they were all awake in their bunks anyway wondering what that infernal beeping was all about. Given the store and forward nature of Inmarsat C, a lost signal here and there would have been OK except for the beeping, and for the fact that it was also meant to be used as a distress system. However, without being able to send a message rather quickly in the event of an emergency, it couldn't really be relied upon as a distress system. We traced the problem to an undersized cable run all the way to the top of the mainmast. The antenna is being moved to a location closer to the transceiver (probably on the mizzen spreader) and will be re-wired.

The Iridium phone was my own personal contribution to the boat's array of communication goodies. While mostly reliable, it had a few quirks that we learned about the hard way. I had activated the voicemail system for an extra $10 per month, but I had previously disabled the call forwarding feature of the phone to avoid costly and unnecessary satellite charges for unanswered calls. However, the voicemail system relies on the phone being able to forward unanswered calls to your mailbox, and so until I fixed this I wasn't getting any voicemail messages. The short 120 character text messaging system worked very well, though at times the messages would get held up for up to 24 hours until I placed an outgoing call at which time the cork would pop and I'd get 5 or 6 messages all at once (usually from Tim, asking why I haven't replied yet). This was most likely due to the most significant misjudgment on my part - when belowdecks the phone would seem to get a signal (as indicated by the cell-phone like bar system: 2 bars out of 5) and so that's where I left it most of the time. In fact, the signal below was too weak to be reliable. Calls made from below were frequently dropped. Bringing the phone above decks (either in toto, or by using the bundled external antenna) yielded nearly flawless results with nary a dropped call even in the rainy foggy weather than prevailed much of the time.

As for the SSB, with all the playing around I was doing with the above systems, I hardly got to use it at all. We were able to receive a nice clear signal from the UK's weather fax transmitter, though we got most of our weather information elsewhere. I had planned to contact Tim on his SSB over the airwaves, but our schedules never wound up allowing for the right combination of: (1) me having access to the SSB without infringing on the crew's sleeping habits or on my own sightseeing habits, (2) Tim's having access to his radio without infringing on his wife's expectations that he spend at least a few minutes a day not working, and (3) both (1) and (2) happening during a time when propagation favored our actually making contact over 5,000 or so miles.

And the reliable VHF? Well, the fixed mount Icom worked without a hitch - bringing in lots of local Spanish and Portuguese commentary. And on the one occasion we tried to communicate between the mothership and the handheld, we failed. At the time, I thought it was because my Standard Horizon radio (new to me this season) was still in US mode as was clearly indicated on its display, and there was no obvious way to get it to switch to International mode to match the settings on the fixed mount radio. I tried all the buttons. Even found the magic combination of holding down the backlight key while powering on the radio (intuitive, no?) to adjust the default settings, but to no avail. It wasn't until I got home and read the manual that I found that switching between US, International and Canadian modes could "easily" be accomplished by holding down the "16/9" button while simultaneously pressing the "Wx" button. How could I have missed that? I'd love to dedicate an entire newsletter to the design of interfaces, but I'm afraid I'd exceed the limit of many email servers' capacity with my ranting on that particular topic. In any case, there was another fundamental problem we had in dealing with making the two VHF radios communicate with each other - had something to do with making sure the other one was actually turned on.

Oh yeah, and we did some sailing too. Or at least that's what they told me from up in the cockpit.

Next time, I'll share my experiences with sending and receiving email over our various systems. Until then . . .

- Dan Piltch
dpiltch@MarineComputer.com