At home the weather is beamed to us through the internet, the speed is dictated in the city by how much you want to pay. At sea I suppose it is the same, but the costs are a lot more and the speeds are a lot less.
At sea the options for internet include:
- GSM in coastal locations – the same as speeds and prices as on land. Range is very limited and varies along the coast.
- Satellite products – many of which are a similar speed to very slow dial up.
On Coppelia we are using GSM. We are currently looking at variety of different modems using both the Vodafone 900mHz network and also XT.
The main purpose of internet access on the boat is for weather information, both weather charts like you see on TV, and also weather data for use in EXPEDITION to optimise our course. Weather data is very much a “nice to have”, but weather charts in inclement weather are essential.
As a backup to our GSM internet I have been building and installing a weather fax demodulator, which receives weather charts through our high frequency (HF or SSB) radio. A variety of different charts are sent out daily. The two biggest advantages to this system is that HF is not affected by distance from the coast – making it more reliable than GSM and secondly it is free !
Check out the website next week to see if my home made demodulator works!
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