Hi. Curious for thoughts from fellow OCC’ers…

I have a small (31’) bluewater boat and have sailed from home in Florida to Maine to the Caribbean and am planning on future voyages south and north, and hopefully a transatlantic attempt in the next year or so. I use IridiumGo and PredictWind and am quite happy with it’s stability and the weather, email, text messages, and voice I send and receive with it. I don’t have an SSB radio though. When I acquired the boat the PO had must have been planning to put one in, the boat has a dynaplate installed and insulators on the backstay.

In 2022 do others think an SSB is still a necessity? If I didn’t have the satellite comm, I would definitely say yes. However, I don’t feel like getting into the installation hassle, complexity and expense of a new SSB radio if I’m not going to use it. I’m not a chatty type so can’t see myself loving SSB nets.

Any thoughts appreciated. Thanks!

+x

 

Roberto.Ritossa - 26 Jan 2022

Hello,
depending on your preference for weather information, an intermediate option is a HF SSB receiver, cost 50-100 euro, installation is very simple. There is a lot of weather information available for reception both sides of the Atlantic, some are voice bulletins, then you have weatherfax from the US (New Orleans for Tropical and Boston for Northern Atl.), from the UK Northwood and the German DWD for the Eastern side.
The DWD also broadcasts a couple of very interesting RTTY products for the NE Atlantic + North Sea and also Mediterranean, they are a sort of "poor man's grib", forecasts to 3 or 5 days for a serie of given points
Example:
https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/streckenseewetterberichten/streckenseewetterbericht.html

English Ch. East (50.30N 0.60W) WT: 10 C
Day    hour    wind direction in 10m    wind force 10m    gusts 10m    sig. wave height    weather
    UTC    compass rose    Beaufort    Beaufort    m    text
We    12    W-NW    2-3         0.5    
We    18    W    3-4         0.5    
Th    00    W    4         1    
Th    06    W    5         1.5    
Th    12    W    5         1.5    RAIN
Th    18    W-NW    4         1.5    
Fr    00    NW-N    3-4         1    
Fr    06    NW-N    2-3         0.5    
Fr    12    SW-W    2-3         0.5    
Fr    18    SW    4         1    
Sa    00    W    4-5         1    
I notice the formatting is lost, have a look at the above internet address to see how they appear. There is a German language and an English language product: they are NOT the same, one goes to 3 days the other to 5 days; both broadcast twice a day.
All of these can be decoded very easily: a small receiver, a long wire as antenna (no grounding required), some software like Seatty, JVComm32 or the likes.
It's up to you to see what type of weather product you feel comfortable with. Personally I have the three, SatPhone, HF receiver and Ham transceiver with email capability; the sat phone is in the grab bag, I take it out for the occasional call home, for specific data email I use the transceiver (very seldom for voice), though the products I prefer are weatherfaxes, there can be several a day, sometimes I just leave the receiver on and it records them all.
 
regards
roberto

Hi Roberto,
A very nice contribution.
I see you are a Ham as you operate a Ham transceiver. Do you use Winlink?
Other nice aspects of a HF receiver alone is that you can listen in on wx reports such as Chris Parkers in the Bahamas/Carib/US east coast as well as the nets and those broadcasts such as the BBC and VoiceAmerica puts out.
For wxfx and RTTY one has to cobble together a connection to a computer: not usually a big challenge, but you are looking at power usage for longish periods for each which might not be great on passage.
WXFXs are always of interest, but take some skill to interpret for some: wind & wave are pretty easy but surface analysis and forecasts take practice.
We used RTTY when I was coordinator of the MedNet for a couple of seasons. It was easy to download and interpret, but I found of limited usefulness compared to gribs and one needed to download a lot of data to extract the nuggets that were truly useful to your cruising plans. I consider gribs to be foundational (for onboard forecasting and routing) and generally pretty easy to access on a boat.
More local sailing is best (in my mind) served by internet sources of wx augmented by a bigger picture and longer time span that small scale gribs can give you.
So, one of my first considerations is to be able to access gribs while on passage and when coastal cruising. A HF receiver is limited in this respect as it is unable to request a grib. Your sat devices, if properly set-up should be able to do so. And, for sure, your Ham transceiver can access gribs through Winlink as that is what I did for decades.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy