|
Radio - The
Cruiser's Telephone
3/25/02
Blaine Parks
“Charbonneau, Charbonneau…Milady Calling”.
Their voices boomed into our boat as though they were right
next-door, but in fact, our friends on Milady were still hundreds of miles
away. We’d last seen Brad,
Sandy, and their two kids, Christin and Kurtis, almost a year earlier. We parted in Marathon, FL as we headed to explore the Florida
Keys and they left for the Bahamas and, ultimately, as far south as
Grenada before heading back to the US. Other
than the rare email from the occasional Internet Cafes, they hadn’t been
able to stay in touch very often. That
was until we installed our marine Single-Side Band (SSB) radio.
Now with the turn of a few knobs, we could close the distance
between us and catch up with our cruising friends.
And, with the exception of the original cost of the radio, our
‘long distance’ conversations were free of charge.
Two of our
most valued pieces of equipment have become the SSB and VHF radios.
We were in the Abacos when Milady reached us from St. Johns, USVI. Neither of us was in an area where a phone connection
would work. The SSB was our
only real hope of connecting. Such
is the case for many cruising boats.
Once you leave the convenience of cell phones or easily accessed
landlines, the radio becomes your lifeline to other boaters for the
exchange of emergency, weather, or social information.
While the VHF radio works within shorter distances (25 miles or
line of sight), the SSB radio can connect you with stations around the
world.
One of our best examples of staying in touch via SSB is when our friends
on Cherokee Rose crossed to the Bahamas. It was their first passage across the Gulf Stream and their
first test of the boat after numerous engine repairs. We picked them up on the radio soon after their departure
from Lake Worth and checked in with them every two hours throughout their
journey. We know how alone
you can feel when making passages and it gave them piece of mind knowing
someone would come looking for them if they didn’t check in. As
it turned out, they encountered another engine problem a few hours from
their destination. Without
radio contact, we would have become worried because they were pushing the
limits of being overdue.
You’ll still use your VHF radio to contact marinas and the occasional
(hopefully) towing service once you leave your home waters.
However, the VHF radio will also take on a whole new life.
You’ll make dinner reservations, talk to local businesses, listen
to informative radio-nets when you’re in larger anchorages, and stay in
touch with other boaters while waiting out a blow in the anchorage.
In many remote places, the radio replaces the phone.
There’s no infrastructure to install like with phones, so the
locals rely completely on their inexpensive VHF radios instead.
With the SSB
radio, you can check in with other cruisers on one of the many formal SSB
radio-nets or set up a time to connect with your family and friends.
However, the radio’s importance goes far beyond its social
usefulness. The radio also
plays a significant role in collecting weather information.
Weather information is available in voice, text, or weather fax
format. You can tune to a
number of frequencies and get a voice broadcast for your area several
times a day. If you’d like
more focused weather information, you can listen to Herb (SouthBound II,
12359 Mhz) at 1500 EST each day. Herb
and other stations can provide personal weather and route forecasting for
a small fee. Instead of
listening to weather for just your area, you get weather for where you
are, where you’re headed, and where you’ll find those winds you’re
looking for. Lastly,
there are several programs allowing you to hook up your laptop computer to
the radio to receive text or fax images detailing current or forecasted
conditions around the world. We
use all these weather services depending on what we need to plan our
passages.
Like all the
commercials say, “But wait, there’s more!”
If getting detailed weather or connecting with your far-flung
cruising friends isn’t enough, how about being able to send emails to
your worried family from the middle of the Pacific ocean?
With the addition of a small device to your SSB radio, basically a
radio modem, you can subscribe to one of several email services.
These services have stations around the globe that receive and
retransmit your emails to any email address in the world, whether they are
other cruisers in mid-ocean or those loved ones back home.
If you’ve read ‘Dispatches from Satori’ on our site, those
dispatches were all sent via SSB email. There are some restrictions on
email size and the amount of time you can transmit each day if you’re
using the marine SSB frequencies. Many of those restrictions go away when you obtain a HAM
operators license. In fact,
many more radio services open up to you when a licensed HAM operator is
aboard. We’re planning on
taking the licensing test as soon as we stop the boat long enough.
We waited
until we were leaving the US before installing a SSB radio aboard
Charbonneau. After almost a
year of having it aboard, we can’t remember how we got along without it.
Our friends seem closer, our weather more reliable, and our
passages aren’t as lonely as they once were.
If you’re planning to untie those dock lines and go cruising,
don’t forget to install your ‘cruiser’s telephone’, a marine SSB
radio. Once installed, or if
you already have one aboard, listen out for us on the local radio nets and
say hello. We’d love to
hear from you.
|
