On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:28:29 -0400, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Tue, 8 Jun 2010 11:15:30 -0700 (PDT), Bob
wrote:

and those same guys go around telling people they are not safe and
stupid to cruise with out a tx ham radio. Have your fun soldering
Heath Kits together but be realistic when it comes to reliable and
safe at-sea communication.

Almost all of the pleasure boats that I know who engage in
offshore/international cruising have a marine SSB radio aboard, and
they are not necessarily ham radio operators although some are. Many
also have a sat phone of some sort and an EPIRB. We don't have a sat
phone but do have the SSB and EPIRB. If we were crossing oceans I'd
probably get the sat phone also, for redundancy if nothing else.

A good friend did a cost analysis on long distance communication for
his new Cat. He calculated that, not including installation, the SSB
was more expensive then the Sat-phone, as well as being more
complicated to install on a new boat. So he installed the Sat-phone.

However, I don't believe that he is using Iradium, rather he is using
a system that uses a fixed satellite with a foot print covering the
Asian region and I know that he has coverage at least from Hong Kong
to Thailand and the Malaysian peninsular. This system may be cheaper
then Iradium which is a world wide system.

I priced a similar system in Singapore a year or so ago and from
memory you could get on the air for less then US$1,000, closer to
700-800 U.S. dollars. The "gimmick" is that the top-up cards are
limited in how long a particular top-up is valid. If you don't use the
minutes by a certain date they automatically expire. So you always
need an extra top-up "card" on hand. This also applies to the pre-paid
hand-phone systems so the idea is commonly used in communication
systems here.

He uses some sort of e-mail service and can send e-mail from his
laptop on the boat to an Internet e-mail server somewhere, so his
communication is equal to any Internet system anywhere. And of course,
he can make voice calls.

What I see here is that the older boats all have a pactor system and
newer boats have Satellite phones.


Cheers,

Bruce
(bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom)