Marine Weather Forecasting

[MarcW]

Ive used Globalstar and have gone over to Iridium, 4 years ago it took 5 phone calls to arrange a tyre at Alice Springs.
Imagine Sat phone emergency call you would not get your position out.
As for data you be Off more than On.
That my 2 cents

[skipgundlach]

Originally Posted by schoonerdog

Just looking at both systems, the pactor modem looks like it would be about $1100 or so, roughly the same cost as the skymate system. Skymate this year is contructing a South African ground base giving them global coverage now. With the skymate system, it can be used on demand and will send you weather data (I don't think its free though). I'm guessing that with the SSB, it seemed more or less an art form trying to find the right frequency to recieve the right signal at the right time of day.

Not really...

Airmail has a built-in propagation tool for both winlink and sailmail. You have to populate the list in winlink, presuming hams to have more chops in those areas, but it's automatic in sailmail. Once you have the tool installed, it's instant-up with F8.

You choose a station, which is sorted by those closest to you, and then click on the frequency with the best possibility of success, rated in percentages. There are enough with 100% to not bother with the others. The screen will highlight the current time, and you'll have previously entered your GPS location for it to parse the conditions.

If you don't have an automatic setup such as I do, where the Airmail program, through a cable to my IC-M802, makes that frequency connection for me (automatically tunes my radio to the right frequency), you have to dial it in automatically.

A gotcha, however, is that you'll need, in either winlink or sailmail, to offset by 1.5 down for the proper connection frequency.

Also, about weather and gribs, both have free services to let you request files. You send a request, and on your next connection, down it comes. Basically you set the area you want to receive, ask for the file, and down she comes.

Air mail also has a telnet feature, seen as a lightning bolt on the icons at the top. If you have a connection, even very poor, to the internet, as the files are so small, fetching and sending your mail that way is much faster than finding a station to talk to and going through the handshake/login/activate (all automatic once the connection is made) process.

While I use winlink, and before I was a general-qualified ham, sailmail, propagation will make even the fastest Pactors crawl. The very best I have seen is about 12K speeds, and frequently only in the low hundreds - and those speeds will vary during the process of the connection. If your file doesn't go, and the handshake/confirmation process finish, before you lose contact (a frequent occurrence with me), you have to start over again. So, if conditions change, your previously nice and fast connection will slow to a crawl, or you may even lose the connection altogether.

For that reason, any time I have even the poorest internet connection, I use telnet.

Another icon at the top is the one you choose for fetching weather stuff; it will bring up a choice of what to ask for.

HTH

L8R

Skip - see sig for my ham sign :{))

[Larry]

Hi Marc
Here are the up times for globalstar based on Nassau. As you can see there are multiple opportunities during the day to do data or make a call. I have not used iridium but their design is not as good as globalstar when it comes to data. See the test results in an earlier post. Significant difference in baud rate. You do have to adapt your usage to the current limitations.

My experience when used within the current limitations is that the download is fast and reliable given the baud rate and price is much better. My point on the life raft is that the ham radio goes down with the ship. Having spent some time in a raft while it is not pleasant I can wait an hour or so to get my call through. If I were to need help the EPIRB goes off and the phone is just a touch up which seems like a reasonable plan.

Overall at 19.95 per month unlimited usage I am quite happy. It suits my purposes well.
Cheers
Larry


Globalstar Phone Location: Location:
Nassau The Bahamas

Latitude:25.066127 Longitude:-77.339025 Timezone Setting: Location:
Nassau, The Bahamas (GMT -04:00)
Filters: Occuring between: 12:00 AM and 11:59 PM
For day of: All Days START TIME END TIME DURATION Wed Oct 20 10:35:16 AMWed Oct 20 10:40:36 AM05 min 20 sec
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Sat Oct 23 03:28:56 PMSat Oct 23 03:48:06 PM19 min 10 sec
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Sat Oct 23 05:26:26 PMSat Oct 23 05:40:36 PM14 min 10 sec
Sat Oct 23 05:55:26 PMSat Oct 23 06:22:36 PM27 min 10 sec

[skipgundlach]

Originally Posted by skipgundlach

(clip)

While I use winlink, and before I was a general-qualified ham, sailmail, propagation will make even the fastest Pactors crawl. The very best I have seen is about 12K speeds, and frequently only in the low hundreds - and those speeds will vary during the process of the connection.

(clip)

Make that 12 HUNDRED, not kilobytes...

L8R

Skip

[ON3CHD]

Hi to all,
interesting thread even if ...it does not answer my question!!!
Wish to share my experince.
Globalstar reduced price apply to American only...Lucky guys!
Airmail used trough the Winlink2K network is ok.Info available as grib files is however quite limited compared to what you can today obtain from the www. I.E. no 200 or 300 mb contours, wind dir and force, no 500 mb wind dir and force, no relative vorticity, no white cap probability, no www 3 results for the Med...and charts from WL2K are as they are on the servers so quite heavy to download even when having an excellent propagation/connection.
Airmail comes also with an other interesting soft named Weather-FAX that you can use to collect weather charts (...but the result have never been that good to me) or RTTY transmission and even Navtex infos.
Fortunately enough when cruising close enough to the shore many European providers can sell you since recently restricted to Data SIM cards ( that you can plug in your phone or a special dongle like the Vadafone one) at a reasonable price as it also gives you access to the internetThis year I paid 15 € a month for 1 GIG in Croatia, the same In Malta, 0.15 cents of one...€ in Italy per period of 15 minutes ...
Should anyone be able to help me (see post 99) not mentioning however software like GrADS or Unidata IDV 2.9 which are a liitle bit tricky to me I would really be more than happy.

Enjoy your sailing.

[Larry]

Just checked with Globalstar. It is now 35 bucks a month for new unlimited service. The 19.95 has gone the way of the dodo bird but was grandfathered for a while. I think they call it the evolution plan. They just launched another satellite yesterday and will have 6 more up soon. Look for a price increase in the new year when coverage is better.
Cheers
Larry

[KestrelBuck]

1) Larry posted a lengthy explanation of his use of Globalstar for weather and voice communication with home. Just to be sure i understand what he wrote: In prehistoric times (ten years ago) I used my Motorola cell phone as an external modem for my computer and could connect to the www in that way. In principal is that how you are using your globalstar phone?

2) I just looked at the Globalstar web site. The $19.99/month price is still available in North America.

[nohal]

Hi Forecasters,
I've put together a script to auto-calibrate the Adriatic weather charts provided by DHMZ
Hope it will be useful for someone as the global NOAA data often suck at this land-enclosed piece of water and the Croatian model resolution is much better as well (but unfortunately not available as GRIB for free).
All the wind, gusts, cloud cover and rainfall models for 72hours starting 2400UTC from DHMZ are processed. The calibration is nothing special as it's my first try on MapCal & friends...
Thanks a lot to cagney for his OPC script I used as a base

Pavel

[ON3CHD]

Hi.
Thanks.
Where can you by the DHMZ Grib files (Aladin model)?
Regards.

[nohal]

Originally Posted by ON3CHD

Where can you by the DHMZ Grib files (Aladin model)?

Hi,
Aladin/HR data are for sell at SailRouter - SailRouter is used on some regattas in the Adriatic, but I've never actually seen it.
I think I've read somewhere, that you can obtain the grib directly from DHMZ as well but have no idea about the conditions.

Pavel

[Larry]

Reference Kestrels question regarding the use of Globalstar. Yes. It is the same as plugging your cell phone into your laptop. I do believe the baud rate to be much better than the older analog 1200 baud. In this case 9600 baud. Far better than iridium or the SW modems.

All the other stuff is me just trying to optimize my download technique without paying the extra monthly charges that end up depleting your budget. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors when it comes to compression for data transfer so be careful what you are paying for.

The opera browser has a low bandwidth mode which works very well when combined with globalstar's free compression software. I do mostly text and while the web will work it is slow. Operas web compression helps. This is why I have sailmail send me gribs constantly so that I don't have to send out a request. Just download what I want from my text inbox.

Although it says 19.95 month I think you have to get a phone. I bought mine on ebay. If you already have a phone I think it is around 35.00 bucks a month now for unlimited.

Cheers
Larry

[cagney]

While looking at the prospects for the Caribbean 1500 fleet of cruisers that are supposed to start today from Norfolk, I missed an easy way to view all the NDBC:s weather buoys in OpenCPN.
So I came up with a quick little ruby script that presents all the available data in the Mark properties description window, and a link to each buoy page over at NDBC in the "Additional information" dialog.
This info is updated every 5 minutes at the ndbc website!
A sample gpx file is attached.
buoy_rep.gpx.zip.doc
Thomas

[sinbad7]

Excellent Thomas... could you make an European equivalent?

Any way to temporarily switch off the Mark property NAMES?

Tore

[PjotrC]

Originally Posted by cagney

While looking at the prospects for the Caribbean 1500 fleet of cruisers that are supposed to start today from Norfolk...

Easy to see... a Wasa 410 will make it by following the zezo.org route suggestion of today (red) in 7 days 12h 25min, and in 7days 10h 57min by following a rhumb line (green)... A bit of foul wind expected on Nov 12th around 0100UT near the 41046 buoy, but otherwise nice sail...

(Note automatic route generation for evenly-spaced waypoints along a line... coming soon).

Piotr

[cagney]

Pjotr
I don't recognize your grib data! This is the situation tomorrow around the time of the start (it's tomorrow not today as i said earlier).

The main problem is the wind over current in the gulf stream, which will create a very nasty sea state. I would not leave tomorrow, if in cruising mode
Thomas