On this years ARC many boats had SSB, mostly Marine Icom it seemed. The
fleet of 240 boats were split up into 4 SSB radio nets based on predicted
boat speed.
We had about 50 boats in our group (the slow ones), and it was great to
listen to everyone's position and get the wind speed and direction off all
the boats. I was able to plot the weather on a chart and get a good idea
what was ahead and behind. The comfort factor of being able to chat to boats
outside of VHF range mustn't be underestimated. I couldn't justify spending
$3000 on an M802, or even more on the fully legal UK version so I picked up
an old Icom ham rig from eBay for $200 with a view that it only had to last
a year to justify it's cost. As it turned out it worked really well and as a
ham (g4dly) I was able to keep up a daily sked with friends back home in
Liverpool
The iridium was also great; we picked up a second-hand 9500 on eBay for
about $600 and bought about $600 of prepaid airtime, which covered us for
quite a long time. The iridium was great, very reliable, good signal always
and proved great for keeping in touch with families. I was paying about
$1/min I think for calls to landlines. I pay nearly that much for cell phone
calls in this country.
I was surprised that we had several maydays/pan pans within the arc fleet
this year and most of them were handled via emails or phone calls to the
MRCC at Falmouth using iridium or on some of the larger boats Imarsat.
The ARC office back in the UK would email all ARC boats with the mayday
particulars and those who could respond would reply by email then when
approaching the scene would use SSB to try to make contact, then VHF later.
So I think for some time still I plan to keep both, and yes I will always
carry a sextant too.

Paul C
S/V Lady Stardust, Liverpool UK
www.lady-stardust.co.uk
 

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Received on Sun Jan 21 07:04:49 2007