Visions of Johanna is now on the coast of Ecuador, the vast Pacific beckoning. As discussed recently, Gram Schweikert has set the sloop up to test and compare the new compact satellite voice/Internet systems from Iridium and KVH/Inmarsat. Above he's geek goofing with the KVH IP Phone and a Uniden waterproof portable which
can access four lines -- Skype, cell, Inmarsat FB150, and Iridium OpenPort. But he's sure been doing his homework. What follows is the longest Panbo entry ever, in which the good Gram details the hardware, the installation, the costs, first impressions of performance, and plans for future testing...
Anyone with an interest in cutting edge satellite communications should get excited about this photo. You're seeing the 62' sloop Visions of Johanna (VOJ) almost all set to compare Iridium OpenPort and KVH Inmarsat FB150 systems in real blue water conditions. When Bill Strassberg and Gram Schweikert began finalizing plans for The Big Trip from Maine to New Zealand and back, they wanted a voice and Internet system more reliable than the Globalstar set up they've used for years, and more powerful than the Iridium handset service I brought along on our Bermuda to Maine passage. They decided to purchase the OpenPort system themselves, but knowing how able and fair Gram is as an electronics tester, I helped introduce him to KVH, who kindly loaned VOJ the TracPhone 150 above. Gram just finished the FB install in Panama, where they're about to transit the canal, and he plans to write up a series of short- and long-term tests as they cruise the Pacific. You'll read all about the project here and hopefully in longer articles for Yachting and Cruising World. In fact, here's Gram setting the scene:
It took a while, but the premium Garmin VHF 200 is now a reality, and it's a corker. I installed a sample on Gizmo yesterday and spent a fair bit of the day listening to it and trying out DSC features. As Bill Lentz noted in a recent comment, the 200 is a snap to hook up using NMEA 2000, instantly getting GPS off the backbone and delivering DSC call info to any device that knows what to do with it (unfortunately few so far). It also seems to have a sensitive receiver and a nice way of pausing enough in scan mode that you'll often hear both sides of a conversation. But he didn't get into how well the soft key scan (and other) menus work...
Here's Bill Boudreau of Cobra Electronics showing off the two new floating 6 watt handheld VHFs the company announced earlier this week. The higher end model, the MR HH475, includes the Rewind-Say-Again audio recording feature I liked a lot in the original HH425 and the fixed F80. Plus this handset can also double as a Bluetooth handset for your cell phone, much like Cobra's dedicated MR F300 Bluetooth speaker mic. It doesn't have some of the mic's features, like a built-in address book, but it does have the PTT/VOX choice and the noise cancellation that tested so well in my lab. But what if someone hails you on VHF while you're chatting on your phone?
Garmin announced a slew of new products yesterday, the most innovative of which is probably the black box VHF 300 AIS. I think that this is not only the first combination VHF radio and AIS receiver (aside from the mod Icom UK apparently came up with), but also the first AIS receiver with NMEA 2000 output. While there are a couple of issues with N2K AIS target messages right now, I'm confidant they'll be fixed soon, and this will become the way to go. For instance, a Garmin plotter should
easily be able to "direct dial" AIS targets, buddies included, using
N2K. But that's not all to like about this radio...
So now that I have a real yacht, and hope to take her foreign one day, it seemed proper to get an official FCC Ship Station License. And better sooner than later since it includes an official FCC MMSI number, and the FCC will not let anyone transfer MMSI numbers already gotten (very easily) from BoatUS or SeaTow, etc. (despite endless petitions by various boating and safety organizations. And VHF/SSB/AIS devices can not have their MMSI changed without considerable trouble. Plus, getting an official FCC MMSI (with a zero at the end) means I can create a legitimate Group MMSI number, and experiment with that interesting but woefully under used DSC feature. So off I went to the official FCC ship licensing site (above), and into the pits of web form hell...
Some of us got confused last week when Inmarsat introduced its tiny but fast Fleet Broadband 150 Internet & voice service in Miami. While Inmarsat boasted about "sub $5,000" terminal hardware, KVH said it couldn't price its TracPhone 150 yet, and a source told me he'd seen a Sailor price list that put its FB150 hardware at over $5,000 wholesale. What we missed was the $4,995 retail FB150 terminal that's coming from new-to-retail Addvalue Communications. Fortunately, Ronald Hiemann -- who sometimes comments here as "Seajet" (his company) or as "Bremer Speck" (his boat) -- was able to fill me in on the Wideye Skipper 150. His story begins thusly: "Once upon a time, there was a sailor who wanted Internet access at sea on his sailboat..."
I'm in a gang now, sort of, and I like it. Above is my Yachting magazine colleague Jason Wood calling me via FB150 sat phone from the Inmarsat demo boat on Biscayne Bay Monday, photographed by colleague John Brownlee, editor of Salt Water Sportsman. Yesterday I talked and texted via the loaner Iridium 9555 handset with two other members of the gang, SWS electronics guy Glen Law and Sport Fishing electronics gal Chris Woodward. We are testing electronics together, or at least comparing notes, and that's good...
These are big times in the small world of global satellite communications for medium size boats! Yesterday Inmarsat demoed Fleet Broadband 150 hardware and service in Miami (my people were there, and even called me via FB150, full report soon) and today Iridium issued a press release boasting about the extensive sea trials its OpenPort system has endured, and how it's now shipping (actual FB150 hardware, like KVH's TracPhone FB150, won't ship until sometime "this summer"). Meanwhile, yours truly was using the new Iridium 9555 handset to text himself (above) and call his patient spouse from Camden Harbor...
Thanks to Sandy Daugherty over on the Forums, I now know that JRC has introduced a VHF radio series that can easily make direct DSC calls to AIS targets. They are most definitely big ship radios (see diagram below), and they do AIS calling in a way I hadn't anticipated, but still...
