I’m a fan of Marti Brown, author of a several how-to books about marine SSB radios. This is one of the most daunting technologies cruiser may struggle with, and Marti does a good job of clarifying just what it can do for you, and how. I’m just setting up an Icom R2500 receiver to test, and I think the book at right is going to help me listen in to some of the interesting marine nets and other resources. There’s more info at her Idi-Yacht Web site, as well as Amazon and wholesale distributor NavCom Digital. I spoke with Marti this morning and she told me about a neat project getting started in her home port of Marathon, Florida. Boot Key Harbor is full of live-aboards like her, and, despite the sunny weather, they have concerns—hurricanes, homeland security, Avian Flu breaking out in Miami and working down the Key’s single access highway, etc. So they’re setting up the “Boot Key Harbor Tropical Telegraph”, a system of phone trees and radio procedures such that all boats can be alerted of a problem. MMSI’s and DSC are a key part of the plan, and Marti says her fellow cruisers get enthused when they learn just how well DSC can work for this. The local Coast Guard apparently likes it too. The “telegraph” seems like a great idea, and another way that DSC/MMSI use might progress toward the tipping point.
Panbo reader Steve e-mailed a while back asking me to bug the VHF manufacturers to build in a replay feature. He wrote, “I cannot say how many times I have missed something on the VHF and longed for a ‘back’ 10 seconds button.” Well, I thought it was a great idea—lord knows how many times I’ve suffered through a long NOAA weather loop only to space out by the time the particular forecast or buoy stats I wanted came along. But I had nothing to do with the several VHF replay features now hitting the market. First up is a Cobra handheld that was previewed at METS (above). It has a built-in memory chip that records the last 20 seconds of whatever breaks squelch on the channel(s) you’re monitoring. You can also save recordings, make voice notes, or record a canned transmission. The U.S. version of this radio, not yet available, is also dual band, able to do GMRS with 5 watts of transmit power. I suspect that Cobra has a hot product here, and I’m hoping to test it when available. (There will also be a fixed Class D VHF with “Rewind, Say Again”.) Meanwhile, out in Everett, Washington, professional skipper Scott Sucke has developed Last Call, a VHF speaker with a memory chip inside. Straight up it will probably make your existing VHF sound better (building radios waterproof is not good for speaker performance), and it will replay/amplify the last 60 seconds of continuous transmission, save it too. Apparently the Washington State Ferry Service likes them enough to equip its whole fleet. The Last Call Web site has a demo video and contact information, but note that there’s $99 deal going on the first manufacturing batch, “while supplies last”. I hope to test Last Call too.
One factor inspiring me to get a bigger boat is an old friend who spend a few days with us recently. Bruce is older than me—which is old—but last year he sold his house and took off in his 34’ sloop down the East Coast and into the Bahamas. He had a wonderful time, and now has the boat back in the Chesapeake for some work, and plans a more leisurely trip South this fall. He kept things quite simple, no computer, but he did invest in that $100 PocketMail Composer above. In the photo he’s dialed an 800 number that came with his $15/month subscription, and then squeezed the gadget’s adjustable earphone and speaker against my handset and pushed the button that activates the acoustic modem. After a period of squeaks and squeals, he had sent and received his e-mail, as shown below. No color screen and no attachments, but the PocketMail system works economically in many parts of the world (In the Bahamas, for instance, there’s a Nassau access number, meaning Bruce could use a cheap in-country calling card at pay phones). Here’s the PocketMail Web site.
My photo is none too great, but at least at bigger size you can make out the hardware components. Port Network’s approach to marine WiFi is not a fixed high dB antenna but rather minimizing the distance between an independent, well amplified WiFi radio and its relatively small antenna. The wiring is further simplified by ‘injecting’ power into the 25’ Ethernet cable. The result: a waterproof, portable WiFi bridge that you deploy on deck when you anchor or tie up. I’ve tried it now in Boston and around Camden Harbor and can say with assurance that it locks in way more WiFi signals than my little Linksys PCMCIA card. It finds available access points automatically, too, though you can use a browser to get into its extensive software, below, and survey what APs are in sight.
The screen shot, incidently, shows how two commercial providers, Abacus Technology and Mesh-Air, have blanketed Camden Harbor with WiFi, and right now the latter is giving it away. Thank you, Mesh-Air. I could barely get two of those APs with my regular card, but I must say I’m curious how this thing would work with a 9dB antenna. On the other hand, it would quite handy as is in several hotels and other situations I’ve been in over the last year. (Here’s a PDF describing the MWB-200 in more detail, and here’s its online store blurb).
PS, 6/15, Port Networks comments:
To answer your speculation about how it would perform with a 9dB antenna: great, when it worked at all. Here's why...
Omni antennas like these are passive devices, achieving their gain by focusing the signal passing through them. They redirect signal that would go up and down, using it to push farther out to each side. (Imagine someone taking a ball of dough and squeezing it down into a pancake. The radius of the pancake is considerably larger than the radius of the ball, and that's the gain.) The tradeoff for higher gain is less coverage -- relatively little signal is being sent above and below that horizontal beam. With a very high-gain antenna, the beam is so flat that alignment becomes critical. If the antennas on either end aren't in exactly the same plane, then they won't even communicate. We chose a 5.5dB antenna to provide a balance between gain and a wider beam. A 9dB antenna would provide twice as much gain, but if the boat rolled, or the antenna wasn't at 90 degrees to the path between the two radios, etc., the signal might be lost entirely.
P.S. I should mention that the above applies primarily to omni antennas. Another way to get gain without giving up too much beamwidth is to use a directional antenna, akin to the reflector inside a flashlight. We will be introducing a second model with a directional antenna shortly. By virtue of its directionality, it will have to be aimed, and you'll therefore need to know the location of the access point to which you want to connect, but for those people who are in the situation of trying to connect a long way within their own marina, it will offer twice the gain of our current model.
Above, in a scene from my DSC testing, the Northstar NS100 has just received a position requested from another radio and the E120 has automatically picked up the message and is offering to place a waypoint and even make it a “go to”. Very cool, except that when you look at the bigger picture, you’ll notice that the position received is an overly tidy 44 13’.000N by 069 04’.000W. It’s damn hard to get yourself that geopositionally neat, and in fact I’m pretty sure this had to do with an ugly little DSC detail known as the M821 expansion. Apparently the original DSC spec had radios sending position in whole minutes, probably to save bandwidth. Later ITU recommendation M821 lets manufacturers optionally broadcast to the accuracy of the attached GPS. That means that the radios have to ask for and send the extra digits of lat and long as another message. DOH!
Actually all the radios I tried (Icom 504, Uniden 625, and Standard Horizon GX3000S, besides the Northstar) seemed to handle the extra precision fine. I suspect that the zeros above, which I didn’t notice until I looked at the pictures, were the result of the second message somehow getting lost. Still, I’m told that there are plenty of “minutes only” radios out there, so if you ever see such a neat DSC position, realize that you’re looking at the corner, bottom right in North America, of a location box that’s one minute square (which good map heads will know is always a nautical mile high but only a mile wide if you’re on the equator).
Finally, note that what you see above is all that a Raymarine E or C series will do with a DSC position, whereas the Garmin 3120 below (bigger here) and some other plotters will let you attach names to MMSI numbers and will keep lists of received calls. I asked Raymarine about this and a product manager said that while he thinks the naming/listing features are cool, he’s not sure they worth the programming resources because so few boaters are really using DSC yet. Point taken!
Geez, it’s been more than a month since I promised some entries about all the DSC testing I did, and I’ve only posted a sidetrack about my sloppy wiring. Well, let me say that I saw DSC work pretty impressively. It was easy to get and program in free MMSI numbers from BoatU.S. and Sea Tow. Then, once I got the annoying NMEA 0183 wiring straight, all four radios accepted position info from either the Raymarine E120 or the Garmin 3210. Inputing another radio’s MMSI, then placing an individual voice call, or sending a position, or asking for a position…all went well. And since I’d done a two way NMEA interface, both plotters, and a laptop running Nobeltec VNS 8, all automatically plotted those position asks or receives. Neat stuff.
But there were some hassles. One function I paid particular attention to was position requesting because that’s how Sea Smart’s interesting AVL tracking works. By default if someone requests your position each radio beeps you for a confirmation, which makes sense privacy wise. Each also lets you turn on an alternate automatic request respond mode (if you can figure where to go in the menu system). But they all still beep, and most still want an acknowledging key punch before they stop beeping! I guess the idea is that you’d want to know if someone got your position, but in the case of AVL this could become quite a beeping pain in the rear. Only the Standard Horizon GX 3000S above had a total silence option (though buried in an entirely different menu). Overall, DSC is fairly complicated to use, and pushes the limited radio interfaces to the wall. Methinks that’s partially why so few people have gotten into it, though I’d guess the main reason is that old communications gotcha — it takes two to tango. But once you and some buddies get your DSC squared away, look what it can do on, say, a Uniden 625 (here, and bigger here, showing not only your own heading but a bearing and distance to your MMSI buddy).
Global Yacht Mobile (GYM) is a new company whose first product is a pay-as-you-call SIM card service designed to help international voyagers manage their cell phone costs. $60 gets you the card with a phone number theoretically in Liechtenstein—apparently a principality that’s friendly to global cell talkers—and $20 of calling credit. You add credit to, or “top off” in Brit talk, the GYMsim using their Web site and your credit card. GYMsim claims significant savings over international roaming and also claims to be competitive with local country SIMs without the hassle of changing cards and numbers from country to country. All rates for some 121 nations are clearly spelled out, including special GYM-to-GYM discounts (hello megayacht crews), and supposedly there are no hidden costs whatsoever. Sounds good for voyagers, or even just scribblers who get to go on exotic press junkets once in a while.
Of course you need to have an unlocked GSM phone, preferably quad band, to use a GYMsim, which is exactly what I ended up with after my phone search a couple months ago. (I got a Motorola V190, above, not the smart phone I was dreaming of, but I like it). So I’m ready to try a GYMsim, which is “in the mail”, but meanwhile I’m curious what you all think of this service, or other ways to do cellular in foreign waters without nasty surprises?
It was just introduced in Japan, so it may be some time before you can get your mitts on this waterproof—30 minutes at 1 meter—Sony Ericsson SO902iWP+. But still, isn’t nice to think that such phones will one day be available? And isn’t funny that the whipper snapper author of the blog where I found out about this phone calls the waterproof feature “useless”, adding “we’ve never really seen the point of waterproof gadgets unless the manufacturers are actively targeting people who make a habit of dunking their gear in toilets.” So cute! We’ll politely not call him an idiot, but simply note that our very first cell phone died dead from just a wee splash of salt water. We like waterproof.
Meanwhile Skype, the king of free computer-to-computer VOIP telephony, is offering free calls to any landline or cell within the U.S. and Canada until the end of 2006. That’s going to please some cruisers who like to use Skype over WiFi along the coasts, as is Skype’s plan to offer a “SkypeIn” service whereby you can purchase a phone number that friends and associates can use to dial your VOIP system. Perhaps the wildest concept: Set up your boat with an amplified and marine antenna’d cellular high speed data card and unlimited service, and then use it along the coasts for e-mail, Web access, and phone calling using a cordless Skype phone like this.
Great news from Annapolis (with a tip’o’the cap to Jeffrey): today there’s a“wire cutting” ceremony to comemorate the advent of free WiFi service in the downtown area, which definitely seems to include the various marinas and even the anchorage (if you have the right gear on your boat). Will cruisers visit more often and stay longer? I wouldn‘t be at all surprised, though there is one unknown. Users of Annapolis Wireless are forced through a Web portal so that advertising can be sold to finance the free service; the ad concept is fine, I think, but I’ve had trouble in the past with the “forcing” technology, as when I once signed up for a day’s service at a Miami Starbucks and spent too much of the day on the cell with tech support trying to figure out why I was getting dropped so much while trying to send photos to a magazine. I also feel a little badly for the nice folks who rent bikes and online computers right near the docks; but maybe free WiFi will mean more bike rentals?
I may be naive--I don't have much experience with testing tools--but Shakespeare's ART-3 impressed me. In this picture, bigger here, that VSWR reading well into the red demonstrates something I'd suspected but wasn't positive about...the old antenna attached to the Icom 504 may look OK but it must be pretty pooched inside. VSWR, by the way, stands for "voltage standing wave ratio" though Shakespeare more reasonably terms it "antenna efficiency". Interestingly the meter showed the Icom and other of my test radios transmitting at a mere 17 watts with this same antenna, but pumping out a full 25 watts with a VSWR of only 1.25 (a mere loss of 2% according to the table on the meter face) when well wired to a decent antenna. Antennas really make a performance difference, as does a good power supply. The $90 (retail, though I don't see a place to buy one online) ART-3 can also generate a tone on Channel 72, thus providing a simple reception test. Note that you do need to provide your own short patch cable between the meter and radio, annoying, but it is smartly designed so that it can be used portably with an internal battery or rigged permanently with wired 12v power.
PS, 3/12/2011: Valuable discussion about what a meter like the ART-3 can, and can not, determine following this entry.
I’m a fan of Marti Brown, author of a several how-to books about marine SSB radios. This is one of the most daunting technologies cruiser may struggle with, and Marti does a good job of clarifying just what it can do for you, and how. I’m just setting up an Icom R2500 receiver to test, and I think the book at right is going to help me listen in to some of the interesting marine nets and other resources. There’s more info at her Idi-Yacht Web site, as well as Amazon and wholesale distributor NavCom Digital. 
will also be a fixed Class D VHF with “Rewind, Say Again”.) 
Great news from Annapolis (with a tip’o’the cap to 