Stating our 3rd day and we are are still heading East. The winds have remained out of the north and we are taking advantage of them to get as far east as we as possible before they shift more easterly.
Once they clock to the east, which the trade winds down here always do, we will make our turn to the south and head for the islands. We are still not sure of where we will make land fall, depends on when the wind shifts and we make our turn south.
The weather remains very pleasant, sunny and warm. With just a smidge more wind it would be perfect.
Our position as I write this is “25 22.900n, 071 53.900w” If you Google map exactly those coordinates (without quotes but with comma and spaces) it should show you where we were.
For the technically curious, I thought I might give a short explanation of how these words get posted.
Both WordPress (for our blog) and FaceBook make available special email addresses for making posts via email. So when you send an email to that address it will end up posted on your blog or FB.
After constructing the post via email, the next step is connecting to an email server to get the mail sent.
On the boat we have a special modem called a PACTOR modem that can talk to other modesm over the radio. The radio is an ICOM M802 single sideband transceiver. We can use this radio to talk long range to other radios (we talk every few days to my brother Kurt in Michigan for example) and the PACTOR can also use it to talk to distant computers.
So, once the email is ready, we use the SSB radio and the PACTOR to converse with shore stations and send the mail for us. The shore stations are provided by an organization called “Sailmail” and are located such that users can contact a station from pretty much any in the world.
Jeff and Mary
Plugged in your coordinates, had to back out like 9 clicks to get to something other than water lol. Careful out there, always thinking of you guys Jon and Michele
Hi Jon,
Yes, we were a pretty long way from anywhere out there. Glad you are watching!
Interesting on the communications… You can actually use your radio as an email instead of a cell phone when out of range? … From what I know the regular VHF radio is only good as far as the horizon – so not good for long distances.. So sounds like the SSW is much stronger. Do you have a satellite phone in case the radio goes out? … I am right? I love this sort of stuff…John.
You are right John. We have a modem that works over the radio just like the dial up modems used to work in the dark old days. We can use to modem to connect to servers either over our ssb radio or over the Iridium system with our sat phone. The ssb radio is a short wave ham radio and can have a range of thousands of mile in the right conditions. The sat phone works almost everywhere. (The VFH is just line of sight so maybe only 25-50 miles depending on the height of both antennas)
The Iridium system uses many low orbit satellites so your phone might only need to look up a hundred miles or so. This allows low power handsets. The down side is many dropped calls.
For email we find the ssb radio is more robust.
Both systems are very slow though and are really only suitable for text based email.
Jeff