Don't know why the price went up. Have you asked them?
Sailmail is a bit different than Winlink in that the cost of
running the base stations is subsidized by the Sailmail
organizations whereas Winlink stations are the sole responsibility
of the owner. I suspect that several more Sailmail base stations
have come online and therefore have to be supported.

Winlink is pretty busy. The management team has been taking
steps to ease the congestion. I also had both Sailmail and
Winlink while in the Bahamas and up and down the ICW with
no real trouble with either. There are so many Winlink base stations
and many have multiple receivers so I rarely had much trouble
finding one. The catalog feature of Winlink is what I found the
most useful. Also, the propogation module made finding potential
stations a snap. At the time Sailmail was not supporting PACTOR III
so the superior speed of Winlink when downloading weather
products made life nice. I could reliably connect at 1400 baud and
occationally up to 3200 baud.

Doug, k3qt
s/v Callista

"Paul" wrote in message
...
Last summer, on a sailing cruise from San Francisco to the Hawaiian
Islands
and back, I used both Sailmail and Winlink. Well, I *tried* to use
Winlink,
but I had so much trouble getting a useable connection that I finally gave
up on it and ended up relying on Sailmail. It seemed to me that Winlink
was
so overloaded that it was practically useless. Sailmail let me connect in
reasonably short order, which is an issue on my sailboat since I don't
like
burning up excess Amp Hours trying and retrying to connect.

-Paul (wb6cxc, S.V. VALIS)



"Doug Dotson" wrote in message
...
As long as you don't need to conduct business via email,
Winlink is a better service anyway.

Doug, k3qt
s/v Callista

"Freebee" wrote in message
...
maybe i'll just do the ham thing.