Tech article – weather data, sat comm. etc

I have had a few questions about how we got weather data on to the boat.

We had a Iridium 9500 phone, with an external antenna mounted on the stern of the boat.

We had a modem that we attached to the phone. The 9500 is the oldest Iridium phone but we had no issues with it.

I used an Ocens email account  see http://www.ocens.com/OCENS-Mail-P78C27.aspx 

Their email software is available at http://www.ocens.com/OCENS-Mail-P78C27.aspx

This software includes all the drivers required for the sat phone. Note: we were able to use a 9 pin D com port on our PC, while many other users may not be able to, and have to use a COM to USB converter. While this may work I have no experience with it. To load the drivers, first load the above software, connect the phone and turn it on, open the OCENS.Mail software >> Program>>Modem/Dialup Installer and follow the steps. NOTE, that when it is looking for devices it takes a very long time!

Once the software was installed, I changed from the standard iScribe email client to ThunderBird, as this enabled me  more options with attachments. To do this download and install ThunderBird http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/. Then open OCENS.Mail >> Options >> Settings >> E-Mail Settings and change Preferred Mail Client to Thunderbird.

Sailing two handed, I wanted to automate my weather downloads, so all I needed to do was download my email.

To do this I send am email from our OCENS account to subscribe to SailDocs to send my GFS data twice a day at 6am and 6pm.

 

The email was as follows

Address query@saildocs.com

Subject  NO SUBJECT!

Body text

sub GFS:15S,43S,150E>165W|2,2|0,12,18,24,36,48,60,72|PRMSL,WIND time=06:00 days=30

and a second email with the body

sub GFS:15S,43S,150E>165W|2,2|0,12,18,24,36,48,60,72|PRMSL,WIND time=18:00 days=30

 

These email will cause the SailDocs server to send me GFS data for the area 15S to 43S, 150E through the dateline to 165W, a 2 deg of latitude, for model run hours 0,12,18,24,36,48,60,72. The variables sent will be Pressure and Wind. The data will be sent at 06:00 (18:00) UTC to my email account for 30 days.

If you are running Expedition, you can simply select the area you want, go to WEATHER >>SailDocs select the area and  the data you want as normal, then select Email Request.

An email with the request parameters will then come up in a new email. Replace send with SUB, and add time=time wanted, and days=no of days wanted.

 

The other information I had emailed to me, was the Yellow Brick positions of other boat.

Body text for this email was

sub http://yb.tl/RNZTH-expedition.txt time=06:00 days=30

This will send Expedition formatted position data to you. I had these sent at 6am and 6pm. For other races simply find the race code for example RNZTH for the internet tracker site.

Once you have the email, to use the data in Expedition, you need to copy the data into an excel file, making sure it is columns, i.e all the latitudes are one below each other. Then you need to save the schedules with a filename of “ Scheds_ (2 digit year 2 digit month 2 digit day 2 digit hour 2digit minute)”.csv (example Scheds_1205261200.csv) . Once saved you can them import into Expedition.

Note for using the schedule function in Expedition, you must download the BoatID.csv file before leaving land. Import the boats in to Expedition, and make your boat the reference boat, otherwise it will not work.

Good LUCK!