Communications

Satellite Iridium Communication Near Shore Communication Single Side Band Weather Radio

Satellite Communications

The Shearwater II comes with an ICOM VHF radio, typically used to ask bridge tenders to open or close their bridge. Ours has a range, under ideal conditions, of about 40 miles. Shortly after the crossing, our ICOM filled with water and died. We replaced it with a Standard Horizon Eclipse, about $150, that was waterproof and has given us no trouble.

We wanted more. There are two major technologies that provide communications to the voyager who find themselves hundreds or thousands of miles from shore.

Radio Amateurs and sailors have used Single Sideband (SSB) radio for years to communicate all over the world. With patience, skill, and luck anyone anywhere can talk with anyone. SSB is about $3,000 per station and requires a license to fully exploit its capabilities. If I want to speak with you, you must have a SSB and an amateur radio or marine license to communicate and contact a specialized operator or a willing volunteer to complete part of the call via telephone.

SSB is also capable of limited electronic mail and can be quite reliable and inexpensive when working at its full capability.

We elected to go further with technology and select a satellite-based system. We learned the price new adopters of technology pay for being the first on the block.

Ocean 2000 (that is the brand and the price, best I can tell) is based on a small box built by Panasonic that contains a transmitter, receiver, and Global Positioning system. It uses store and forward message technology with a limit of 200 characters unless the satellite can see both the Shearwater and the ground, an infrequent event. The system proved to be unreliable - even with excellent support by the vendor.

Iridium Satellite Telephone

Many of you know that Iridium is a constellation of low earth orbiting satellites designed to work with relatively low power hand held telephone size earth stations, commonly called telephones. Some of you probably know that even with advanced technology and a working system, Iridium was not financially viable and entered bankruptcy. The judge ordered the company to de-orbit and burn up their satellite, ending the service. Fortunately, additionally funds became available and they are now, at least for the moment, back in orbit (so to speak). We purchased a refurbished Iridium phone, external antenna, and data kit for about $550 from West Marine.

Iridium works almost like a cell phone from the user's viewpoint. All calls are international calls and there is no longer a charge for incoming calls - the caller pays the international call fee to their long distance carrier. In many cases, the Iridium charge is less than the international land like charge for calls to some parts of Europe. Charges drop to $1.19 per minute in stepped increments and unlike our cell phone carrier, we do not need to purchase a fixed minute increment each month - less minutes are charged higher and if you go over the boundary, the minute charge for all previous minutes is reduced to the current charge.

The monthly fee has been increased to $25 for fixed charge service (typically emergency use - $1.49 per minute). For a $29 monthly fee, you can elect a sliding scale per minute fee that drops, as explained above, as your usage increases.

Iridium data service is charged at the current minute rate and can be quite expensive when your friends send you jokes or photographs. Iridium offers an optional (free option) data compression service and the ability to automatically connect and disconnect during a session such as e/mail that may not require continuous activity. We were never able to get the data compression to work - even after many calls to the help desk - also free. This month we found that Iridium charges for attempted, but uncompleted, data calls to their service. We had no real idea how frequently data calls were uncompleted since our system retries them automatically. A $900 monthly bill consisting of mostly calls under 1 minute gave us the idea. We are in discussion with Iridium as you read this to reduce the bill.

The voice and data quality are usually excellent (as good as a better cell connection). Voice and Short Message Service (small notes on the phone sent at no charge to the sender) worked flawlessly from the first day. Data took several mid-ocean (actually Bahamas) calls to their free help line - but eventually we jointly discovered how to send and receive e/mail from the shearwater-sailing.com domain using the Stratus component of Iridium. Neat trick - not everyone at their help desk understands how it works.

Routine data calls to an e/mail address they provide should be no problem - just expensive if they continue to charge for failed calls.

We made an interesting discovery about using the Iridium phone with the external antenna. The antenna, a magnetic hockey puck size, was designed to adhere to the roof of a moving car and give the phone signal an extra boost to improve the signal. We have nearly nothing magnetic on the boat - so we put the antenna on the coach room. No improvement was observed.

Eventually, I dreamed about an antenna class I took in college. The instructor likened an antenna to a child playing jump rope with another child. One end of the rope was usually tied to a tree to give the swinger something to pull against while the jumper competed. He explained an antenna works the same way - the active part must have a good ground to pull against for the signal to radiate fully. Our boat makes a poor ground.

One more good dream solved the problem. An ordinary cookie sheet is both magnetic and large enough to provide the "tree", or counterpoise, for an antenna operating at Iridium frequencies. We slapped our magnetic hockey puck in the middle of a convenient cookie sheet, put it on the coach roof and transmission improved dramatically.

A few weeks later, our daughter, Julie, was visiting us and wanted to call home. Now Julie has a lot of poise - having worked as a concierge in a major hotel, when I told her to use the cookie sheet as a counterpoise - well, she picked up the cookie sheet, clipped on the hockey puck, and tried to call her friend in the states.

I really do try to keep my jargon under control, I suppose I'll have to try harder.

Back to Top Satellite SSB Receiver Weather FAX

Near Shore Communication

Satellite communication a viable option offshore where only satellites and Single Side Band (SSB) can operate. SSB gives you the ability to talk to boater friends in other places in the islands when you want to just chat or have a concern or emergency. Cellular technology is initially less expensive and potential more versatile than either satellites or SSB. An initial $1000 or more investment is required, but after that voice and e/mail is quite inexpensive. Anyone can call you by directly dialing your phone number (is this an advantage?), and cellular technology is ubiquitous. Unless your plan has free nights and weekends, data on cellular can rack up large minute charges very quickly.

Near shore (20 miles or less from land, most of the ICW, and major bays such as the Chesapeake) communication must be much less expensive to compete with nightly trips to shore or Pocketmail.

Most of the world including South Africa, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have adopted the same cellular phone protocol to communicate between phones and the many towers that support them. This protocol supports voice, data, and fax on the same telephone and reliably delivers internet service anyplace the telephone operates. We used this technology, Global System for Mobile (GSM), on a cellular phone in Capetown. This phone also provide Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMC) data service. It supplied our voice and internet communication with little difficulty once set up by the store. Inexpensive, reliable and fast. Recently, Voicestream, the GSM provider in the United States, introduced GSMC service and began to extend their coverage area - now including the Mississippi River valley. AT&T is in the process of adopting GSM as their preferred protocol in the United States. GSM should be widely available and reasonably priced.

In the United States, GSM is a trailing technology, being outpaced by a number of competing but older technologies that create a confusing web of systems, each offering internet service and each falling short of meeting the requirements of an internet user like us that routinely transfers 10 megabytes or more of pictures and data to up this growing web site. Sprint is on the way with their technology - but not there yet in many places you might sail.

Cellular Digital Packet Data

To help mobile users in the United States communicate, the makers of cellular phones have developed a wireless data protocol, Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD). We have purchased one of the many wireless modems on the market, a Novatel Sage. This is an external modem that plugs into one of the COM ports on your tower computer. A number of PCMCIA modems are available that speak CDPD and can be plugged into your laptop eliminating the need for an external device.

Novatel, (www.novatel.com - 1-888-888-9331) is primarily a maker of precision GPS and seems to have fallen into the CDPD marketplace to meet their internal needs to communicate between their survey-grade GPS and users of high precision location equipment. So, if you need sub-centimeter precision or reliable mobile communications, these were the people to call. Novatel provides hardware to several carriers, who in turn provide CDPD service to their customers.

As of October 2002, Earthlink (1-800-327-8454) began providing CDPD service by acquiring GoAmerica. This was about the time we left the CDPD service area for the Virgin Islands, so we have no experience with Earthlink as a CDPD service provider. They are the host of the Shearwater-Sailing web site - that host service has been quite good.

Here they are: The one above, our external modem is about 6” long, it hides behind the rest of the black boxes in our navigation station and runs on either internal batteries, a 12V adapter (not supplied), or an a/c adapter (supplied). Broadcasting on the 900 MHz band, the CDPD devices use a small cellular antenna and connect to a cellular tower just like a cell phone. The units are about $300 for either the internal or external modem and necessary software – but shop around: AT&T is rumored to give them away to new CDPD customers.

The one on the right is a PCMCIA CDPD modem. The alphabet soup means it plugs in to the slot on your laptop that may now be occupied by your external modem. These are available from either Novatel or Earthlink (more below).

Once you make the CDPD decision, you must subscribe to a provider who, for about $39/month, will give you home district coverage. AT&T and Verizon each provide about one-half the US in the more populated areas. You may also elect the $65/month service and leave your home half of the country, you pay a roaming charge that can approach the national debt. For about $39 per month, you operate for no additional charge in the half of the country you select - and must call your service provider (Earthlink) to change your service (no charge for now) if you move to the other half of the country.

Earthlink is a new provider of CDPD service. They bought the customer base from GoAmerica in late 2002. Recent calls to Earthlink have stated CDPD is no longer offered. We'll keep trying.

The CDPD modems are fully IP compatible. Technicians assign you an IP address and gives you a primary and backup Domain Name Server address. These are entered into the easy to install software provided with the modem and produce a Dial Up Networking (DUN) object that can be used exactly as you use the dial-up modems you may now have. We experienced no software problems in installation or use with Outlook, Explorer, Instant Messenger, or FrontPage using CDPD service from GoAmerica in Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC, Florida, Texas and several states in between. We did incur a roaming charge the first month it was introduced. We have no experience with the service now offered by Earthlink, but hopefully it is at least as good as it was when we first subscribed.

CDPD is limited to 19.2 Kb – a rather slow speed by today’s standards. The few failures we have seen in these long updates may relate to scheduled maintenance on the server or one of the many nodes we travel on the way from our location to wherever Mindspring keeps their web hosting servers. Some patience is in order.

Devices that support CDPD are available for many hand held units such as the Palm Pilot, and Windows CD.

ICOM Single Sideband Receiver - PCR-1000

Single Sideband takes its name from the form of the radio wave. Normally, radio waves go up and down just as ocean waves do. In a single sideband wave, the bottom half (or the top half) of the wave is cut off and the power is added to the remaining half. At some frequencies, single sideband waves bounce off the outside of the Earth’s atmosphere much as an apple worm may hit the skin and go back into the apple for more flesh. There are three results:

Single Sideband radios have at least twice the power as a conventional radio for the same input energy.

Due to the bouncing, at some times of the day some single sideband frequencies can bounce around the world and be heard very far from the source. Experts predict this bouncing effect with propagation models that are built into the transmission scheduled used by BBC and others.

It never works for us. The system is terribly complicated and we were not able to get anything beyond an occasional BBC broadcast and a shadow of a weather fax on our installation.

Single sideband is used for informal and emergency communication, weather, and entertainment. We are using it for the latter two.

The radio we selected, an ICOM IC PCR-1000, is a small software controlled receiver with good characteristics in most areas. The entire control set of the radio is software except for the power on switch. The operator has their choice of display ranging from a very complex high-end radio to a less sophisticated unit suitable for casual users.

Our ICOM receiver never quite gives a satisfactory signal. We are unable to determine if the problem is the ground, antenna, or the receiver. We moved it to PatiCat and the performance improved somewhat. Next, we will install a better ground and new antenna cable. If these don't work, we will trash the unit.

Back to Top Satellite SSB Receiver Weather FAX

We installed Weather Fax for Windows, another piece of technology that was destined to never work during our trip. We believe the poor reception on the ICOM receiver is responsible for the poor weather fax service we have experienced.