A technical question: With AT&T going out of the high seas phone business, what would you recommend for someone heading offshore for e-mail and voice transmission? My friend…is taking his Swan 47 into the Pacific and is interested in your answer, as am I (more generally). Regards, John
Hi John: We have a Trimble Sat C and found it much better than SSB or ham which I don’t have the patience for in my old age. Offshore Communications offers automatic (free) high seas weather four times a day for your region (which it knows from the built-in GPS). You can set it to send an automatic position report at whatever intervals desired (sends Lat./LON./Speed/Heading at a cost of about 25 cents/message–we typically set ours for 4x/day). We did a lot of communication with daughters/dad, etc. and our costs ran $200/mo. Lots of shorthand as you pay by the character, about 75 cents per 100 characters. Totally automatic, no band conditions to worry about.
Otherwise, ham patches for non-business is still a good system. But you do have to deal with propagation and it takes a lot of time and energy.
Posted by Steve Dashew (November 30, 1999)
