Communication

Communication and weather.

Siller Lass VHF ship radio has call sign LJ 3903 and digital callsignal MMSI number 257 662 970. VHF ship radio is probably the most important safety device onboard. On the VHF we get gale warnings and weather forecasts and we can call other ships .

Our Raymarine C120 chart plotter gives us AIS (Automatic Identification System) with collision warning and information, like speed, course and MMSI telephone number of any approaching vessel. We can call the bridge using VHF channel 16 . If the vessel is larger than 300 ton, it is obliged to have AIS in function.

Outside Kvitsøy we were on the starbord bow of the huge cruise ship MS Opera. The bridge on Opera answered our MMSI call and advised us to keep course.The huge ship actually increased speed and went ahead of little Siller Lass under sail!

ICE internet and www. This communication system uses the old 450 mhz mobile net and covers the whole of Sweden, Denmark and Norway in one contract. Our ICE uses an antenna on the pushpit. The ICE receiver gives us wifi internally in the boat. Thus Norma, our webmaster, can sit anywhere in the boat with her PC updating our website. On her PC there is a camera where we can show our Skype contacts the scenery we are sailing through! We are measuring ICE download speeds along the coast and are posting the speed on www.sillerlass.no Google map for each harbour. The ICE download speed varies between 0,1 and 2,5 mb/s. So far very few harbours or sailing lanes along our path have been uncovered.
Click on the yellow balloons on our Norway west map to check the download speed.

We have found www.yr.no most useful. On the ICE we test the reliability of www.yr.no several times each day. The Norwegian Met. Office, is doing a pioneer work testing new presentations like «hav og kyst» (sea and coast), rain radar and gives us this service free of charge.

We also use ICE to download gribfiles from U-Grib, a free weather service giving pressure profiles, precipitation and wind on any selected area on the globe.We select our local area and compare our own forcasts from U-Grib with yr.no. Weather can be fun! Extremely important for a sailor! If you want to test the U-Grib system: get download information by googling u-grib.

Kenwood short wave tranceiver. Jon Erik has a radio amatedur license: LA 8HE. For open ocean sailing, short wave communication is an alternative to the more costly satelite telephone. With a Pactor modem, we take down gribfiles when we sail offshore. We also send and receive e-mail at 10-15kb/s which is adequate for simple messages and grib files. During the 2009 Norwegian Cruise, we keep in contact most evenings with radio amateur friends along our long coast. A sailboat is a good platform for shortwave transmission and reception since the ideal ground plane for any antenna is the ocean. We use the aftstay as a non resonant antenna and a capacitive seacoupling through a copper mesh glued to the inside of the hull below the waterline. Our contacts in Scotland and Norway gives us good reports even with as low transmitting power as 20 -30watts. For further information see: www.franksingleton.clara.net and www.winlink.org/features.