For those who harbor plans of a
cruise in
Europe, you might want to read up a bit on ZipGet. This is a tool developed by a British cruising sailor that provides ‘one stop shopping’ for obtaining
weather forecast products in any area of the
Med or Northern
Europe. It is inexpensive (£20/year subscription fee) and can be used by both lightly equipped
boats – provided they have a
cell phone and a way to send/receive
email with it – as well as those
boats using HF
email who can receive attachments with their email (e.g. Winlink works well with ZipGet).
In Europe, it is very common for boats to have
cell phone coverage when making departure decisions or even while underway. ZipGet’s author, Chris Hart, sailing the
Beneteau 36 ZOSTERA, carries no
SSB radio but wanted multi-day forecasts with isobar
charts,
wind projections, wave projections, and at least one multi-day text
forecast for their Atlantic and
Med cruising…and so that’s what anyone using ZipGet can now receive as well. One sends in an email with Lat and Long coordinates in the Subject line, waits a moment, and then pulls down those 4- and 5-day forecast products. Also appealing is that one can use a ‘get’ command in the body of the email to request any text URL info available on the
internet, which will be compressed and included in the one group file that is sent.
For more information on ZipGet, visit
www.zipget.com. I’ve written up a longer discussion on ZipGet at
www.svsarah.com/Whoosh/Comm%20Tools.htm, John Stevenson’s helpful website, which includes download time estimates, file sizes and sample f’cast product collections for different regions of Europe. Chris provides the opportunity to sample the
service for free for those interested in doing so.
Jack
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