Good Morning Steve and Linda: I've been following you advise for years. I have a Valiant 42 with Inmarsat C aboard. I receive poor weatherfaxes from the SSB stateside in the marinas, however in Bermuda they come in beautiful. Do you have any tips for this situation. Also, the main reason for writing: Can the E-Mail address: ftpmail@weather.noaa.gov be used through INMARSAT C? Thanks for everything and keep up the great work and website. Roy
Hi Roy: There are two potential reception problems when you are on the East Coast and unable to pick up weather faxes. The first is outside interference, which is sometimes quite strong along shore. The second is the frequency and/or time of day. You often need to adjust down to a lower frequency, or use a station further away as higher frequencies may be inside of the "slip" zone of the radio station's transmitter. This past summer we were always able to get NMF in Boston at least twice a day, but we had to do some experimenting with the frequencies. It is theoretically possible to use Inmarsat C for the FTP fax sever, however the cost would be horrendous! A much better bet would be a Globalstar phone, which would probably end up costing about 50 cents/fax (rough guess)–as long as you were in their coverage area. But you cannot beat the SSB for price–i.e. free! Regards, Steve
Posted by Steve Dashew (November 30, 1999)
