Communication Evolution on Brick House : Iridium GO! Predictwind!

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Communication Evolution on Brick House : Iridium GO! Predictwind!

My latest article in Ocean Navigator Magazine reprinted below. See the  Original Article at Ocean Navigator..  

Communication on our Valiant 40, Brick House, was once limited to a few methods. The most basic was the very high frequency (VHF) radio used for short-range communications to other boats and shoreside facilities. Single sideband (SSB) radio chat nets were used while underway and from remote anchorages to talk to cruisers at distances over the horizon.

The SSB radio, coupled with a device called a Pactor modem gave us the ability to send and receive text email messages through the software services SailMail and Winlink when the atmospheric propagation was agreeable. We had to train friends and family to keep messages short and without attachments that could easily overwhelm the delicate pipeline of radio waves. Sometimes in port, a hotel or yacht club would offer Wi-Fi, which would be usable on board if we could anchor close enough to the signal. Eventually we installed a Redport Long Distance Wi-Fi Extender on the stern arch so we didn’t have to anchor nearly on the beach.

The SSB was once the primary long-range communications device. Life on board was dictated by propagation tables that spelled out optimum connection times, calculated by the state of the ionosphere, and the distance between stations. Happy hours and barbecues were abruptly interrupted as cruisers raced back to not miss checking into SSB nets or for their turn at being net controller, while others jockeyed for their turn at modem connections.

To make sure both SSB/Pactor and voice communications worked reliably, monthly maintenance demanded copious cleaning of corrosion between the antenna, ground connections, tuner, radio and modem. But in those not-so-primitive times, it was our only option.

Brick House’s radio gear: an HF SSB, a PACTOR radio modem and a VHF.

Growth of cellular
Over time, cellphone connectivity became more accessible because a forest of cell towers went up everywhere, even in the remote islands of Fiji. Competition drove prices down. Natives who lived in thatch huts would row up in rough carved canoes, handing their phones over, asking for a battery charge. At times, we had adventures hiking to a high pinnacle to get a signal from a tower on the next distant island.

In cruising Southeast Asia, we found cellular Internet had become even easier and less expensive. Communication between cruisers, businesses and those half a world away took a big leap forward. Our smartphone became a Wi-Fi hot spot for connectivity on board and the Internet handled all communications. The VHF, SSB and Pactor began collecting dust and rust.

Though Internet had become more accessible, there was often a learning curve to understanding the system in each country. Smartphones in the U.S. are often sold as “locked,” but cellphones internationally are mostly sold as “unlocked” and can use SIM cards from any country, costing only a dollar or two. Now upon arrival to a new country, it has become top priority to visit a cellphone store with phone and required passport so that we can leave with connectivity pronto.

We needed then, to learn how to put more “load” or “credit” on the phone — usually with scratch cards or by visiting almost any store — and then learn how to buy an Internet plan, usually by punching a series of numbers and pound signs into the phone. Every country has slightly different procedures and little gotchas to learn so as to preserve your data. In the past year, in almost every country we visit now, they have even come out with apps to automate the whole process.

The Childresses’ boat is also equipped with an Iridium GO!

For more information and to Buy  the Iridium GO,  Click here…

For the external antenna I recommend for the Iridium GO, Click here
The Weather Program we recommend:Weather

From an energized cellphone, the beeps and dings of Messenger, WhatsApp and email notifications fill the air on board. The notifications are usually from other cruisers, so leaving the annoying VHF turned on and listening to endless impertinent VHF chatter is a thing of the past. SSB nets began their decline in Southeast Asia simply because everyone was connected by cellular, and SSB radios faded away for all but the most dedicated operators. Cellular remains the number-one most utilized communication method in port and for coastal sailing.

But when the Indian Ocean loomed on the horizon, it was time to get suited back up for long-distance remote connectivity. First, I should say, for a while in the remote Pacific, we did have an Inmarsat satphone on board in case of an emergency. It was such an expensive communication device to operate, full of billing surprises, so we hardly used it. We knew this would not be an ideal way to cross the Indian Ocean, being reluctant to use it to get weather reports for extended intervals. We then made the single most drastic change that we have ever made to how Brick House communicates: We sold the Inmarsat satphone to help pay for our new communication system, an Iridium GO Marine Package from PredictWind. This is robust satellite communications.

Switching to satcom
We no longer use the SSB radio/Pactor setup for email or weather — ever. It has nearly gone the way of the cassette player or radio direction finder. We still maintain the SSB, however, just in case. If I were to put money into a backup system now, it would be to have a second Iridium GO. A cruising friend did exactly that but sold it three years later because the original one just never skipped a beat.

The installation of the Iridium GO was like any other electronic device: a 12-volt power source and an antenna on the stern arch. We mounted the antenna as high on the arch as possible to have a clear view to the Iridium satellites, and above the radar dome more than 6 feet from the wind generator to avoid physical and electronic interference. We had to empty lockers to clear the way to snake a rather monstrous cable through small holes without bending it. We permanently mounted the Iridium GO’s gray box near the chart table in a position that would not be in direct sunlight, not incur accidental splashes or bumps, and most importantly would receive a steady GPS position. The small hinged antenna on the unit not only turns the unit on but gets the GPS position as well — just not the Iridium satellites when the external antenna is attached. Many cruisers who don’t have the external antenna have to take the gray box outside and hope it doesn’t fall in order to get a semi-acceptable transmission.

The Childresses use Xgate to manage their email usage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The GO ships with a common automotive 12-volt plug for power. Since the GO is powered via a common USB mini-B five-pin connector, I took the automotive plug side off and hardwired it in to a Wagan smart USB charger. This device is powered via 12V, and then steps down and autosenses the amperage needed to safely charge each device that is plugged in to its four USB outlets, providing up to 9.6 amps. I installed a manual one-hour timer in the circuit so I can wind it up to charge, and then it automatically shuts down to prevent constant powering of the sensitive batteries.

It’s very important to update the firmware upon receiving the unit and watch for subsequent updates, as well as obtain updates for the GO software used on the devices. There appears to be nothing more to maintain aside from keeping the electrical connections tight and corrosion free.

With the Iridium GO and PredictWind’s no-contract unlimited data plan, we have easy access to impressively accurate forecasts using Predictwind Offshore. We are able to send and receive our emails as many times a day as we wish, at any time, in any weather, along with texts to our friends and other Iridium users. We have 150 minutes a month of actual phone calls. So now we can communicate anywhere in the world, anytime, whether it be with family or businesses here, or in the next country for marina reservations, to order needed parts or for technical support to keep our boat operating. We can even get a webpage if we don’t mind waiting. The system is somewhat expensive at $139 per month with an initial setup cost of approximately $1,000, but for someone with business interests, the system could quickly pay for itself by nipping a problem in the bud. And, of course, this is a tremendous emergency communication device.

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Email considerations
Our email setup with the Iridium GO software is a little more complex than many users’ setup due to the volume of emails that we get, which is easily in the hundreds every day. Some people have an “at sea” address and an “on land” address, but we have just one primary email address that covers land and sea so we never miss an email.

The Redport Long Distance WiFi Optimizer (The inside unit) This is then connected to an antenna that sits on the stern arch, which is included with the unit.

First, I will tell you the two requirements that led to having the complexity (yet the simplicity) of just one email address.

  1. I could not afford to miss a single email, large or small, because of having two email addresses, and I needed to have full capabilities on both my tablet and laptop whether at sea or on land.

  2. I planned to shut off the GO service when I was in port, yet I needed to access/send/receive all emails that I had access to while at sea and continue to have that access on land — and vice versa. I needed one application on all devices to send and receive email from anywhere.

The solution? XGate software was installed on my iPad, smartphone and laptop. XGate does it all: connecting to the Iridium GO, the SSB/Pactor or to regular Internet, accessing all of my email and keeping it synced between devices. I can access both new and old emails on any of the devices in the same application with any kind of connection, on land or at sea.

I have all of my email forwarded to my XGate account  — not my Iridium Mail account — and XGate then automatically transmits the short emails. It then sends a list of “large” emails to a folder called “BigMail” (in my case, I chose “large” to be larger than 30kb). I can then decide from that folder which emails I want to receive. I can do this from any device with any connection. I also set up a number of keyword filters to eliminate email that I don’t want at sea, such as Facebook notifications or Dell computer sales.

XGate email management options allow Childress to set the inbound email cutoff size and to mass delete emails.

Note: Some systems, like Yahoo, do not allow forwarding of all emails, and fetching is not recommended in most situations. I will provide a more technical explanation and solution to this scenario on my blog at www.WhereIsBrickHouse.com.

Unless you plan to leave the Iridium GO activated for long stays in port and use it regularly, you cannot access email in the Iridium Mail app or online since it’s only accessible by satellite. XGate not only makes my mail accessible by satellite or Internet, but it does it all in the same application. If two months of email are allowed to get backed up in an Iridium Mail address that can only be retrieved by satellite, there will be a problem. Iridium Mail offers no tools to remedy this case or any other problem, and Iridium offers no technical support, help line or contact information. Using XGate, however, I can simply boot up the laptop where heavy-duty XGate tools reside, and many of the problems are resolved. Reparation at sea becomes quite plausible. There is even a human being on the other end of the phone or email to help since GMN, the makers of XGate, are actual human beings standing by to help. And, of course,  support is second to none, though your Iridium Mailbox is not accessible to them either.

There was something salty about the old days of anticipating a chat session with other cruisers on a schedule over the SSB and having little, if any, email at sea — just simple solitude. Sadly, everyone now seems to be glued to their cellphones, on the boat and on land. Cruisers sit at the yacht club, sipping wine, overlooking the anchorage, and all of them are staring at a screen. Maybe they are in a trance, gazing at my husband Patrick’s YouTube Channel.

Rebecca Childress and her husband Patrick Childress, have a long history of sailing behind them, but most recently they have been cruising the world for 12 years and are in Tanzania en route to South Africa, on their 1976 Valiant 40 Brick House. In addition to their long-standing blog at www.WhereIsBrickHouse.com, Patrick has started a new YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/PatrickChildress.

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Freighter Fright

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Over the years of crossing oceans, I have had to dodge ships while at sea. We have friends who actually did collide with a ship. They were not dismasted nor did they take on water but the damage was extensive, not only to their boat but to their psyche. They put their boat up for sale.

This is the original unedited version of Freighter Fright which appeared in the March/April 2016 issue of Ocean Navigator.   But here I can add links to the proper sites to report errant ships and so anyone can easily find the identity of the owner of a ship.  Also, here I can thank Timothy Farley of the U.S.C.G. , Office of Investigations and Casualty Analysis,  in Washington, D.C. and  Max van de Kemenade at Netwave Systems (they sell VDRs), for all their patience and answers to my endless emails to help with keeping the enclosed information accurate.  Also, other Valiant sail boat owners at the Valiant Owners web site were a big help. Additionally, it took days of reading through endless IMO documents to finally figure out how to report the negligent operation of a freighter.

 

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FREIGHTER FRIGHT

Hollywood would like to make believe that steel containers, fallen from ships, bob around the worlds oceans as numerous as Arctic icebergs ready to sink the dreams of unsuspecting world cruisers. But if this were so, shipping containers would be washing up on every shore far more frequently than beached whales.  It is not semi-submerged containers an ocean crossing cruiser needs to be overly concerned about, it is the cargo ships from which they fall that is the far greater menace.

Anyone who has sailed across oceans for a while certainly has dodged a large ship.  On the bridge of most ships, the OOW (Officer On Watch) and the crew are vigilant and do what they can to avoid a closing situation with a relatively tiny plastic sailboat.  But there is the percentage of ships crew who are either not doing their job of keeping a proper watch or prefer to push their size difference and expect everything smaller to scurry out of the way.  That requires the crew of the smaller sailboat to be constantly vigilant, which is required anyway by international law.

There have been numerous incidents where neither the offending ship nor the sailing yacht yielded resulting in serious damage to the sailboat. In at least one instance the sailboat was macerated, the bits and pieces washing up on a nearby island.  Certainly other sailboats have disappeared without a trace.  But these collisions can happen without the OOW on the ship even realizing a sinking had occurred. During an obscuring rain squall, a behemoth Japanese car carrier cut a commercial fishing boat in half and continued on its way, the OOW never noticing anything unusual.

When the weather is clear, it is especially annoying and dangerous for large steel freighters to fail to follow the COLREGS (International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea) which are internationally agreed navigational rules as published by the IMO (International Maritime Organization).  But the failure is frequent.  So when I saw the cargo ship Pulau Layang (which means “island floating” in Indonesian) registered in Jakarta,  thundering across the ocean at our 40’ sailboat from our port quarter in a converging, rather than an overtaking situation, in the late afternoon with good visibility, I wanted irrefutable proof of what was happening.

Pulau Layang  is required to display a Class A, AIS signal (Automatic Identification System).  Most recreational and fishing boats are not required to transmit AIS but they often do use the less expensive and less powerful Class B, AIS signal.  On our AIS transceiver, the only signal showing was from a tugboat far to our south.  We were in offshore waters in Indonesia traveling south west from the city of Tual to Dili, Timor Leste; a passage of 500 miles.   As the big freighter was closing rapidly, I had time to make only one call on Ch16 to “The ship heading S.W., this is Brick House, the sailboat dead ahead of you.”  With no response I grabbed my camera and quickly climbed back to the cockpit.  As the autopilot steered, I worked fast to take evidential pictures of the approaching ship in the background and what parts of our cockpit would fit in the foreground.  This would be one time I would try to turn the tables on a dangerous freighter violating several international regulations.  I wanted the close proximity pictures to prove the closing situation, the clear visibility conditions and the wave height.  Eventually, with Pulau Layang’s hull becoming frighteningly close to my port side, I turned hard to starboard and jybed to complete a 360 degree turn and snapped a few more pictures with the ship now passing on my stern.  All the while it was best to leave a sleeping beauty lie so I did not rouse my wife, Rebecca, from the aft cabin till the ship passed, the tense situation was over and Brick House was back on its course.

 

As Pulau Layang passed, stacked high over head with green containers,  I could see no one on deck or in the windows of the bridge or the bridges wing deck.  The ship’s continued silence to my repeated calls on the VHF stoked my irritation causing forth a bit of sailors verbiage directed at an imagined crew relaxing in the bridge.  Possibly that crew understood little English but certainly the voice tone would convey the message of my displeasure.  However, it is an IMO requirement that any person standing watch on a ship must have a solid grasp of English and to be able to speak it clearly. They must also answer a call if they are called by ship name. In the past, attempting to converse with passing ships some times called up a jumble of friendly sounding words of a language we couldn’t even guess its origins. But they did respond to the call. From Pulau Layang, there was no response for the full hour I continued calling.  But some of those early emotionally charged calls would later worry me.

Pulau Layang receded over the horizon as Rebecca and I tracked the ship on RADAR. From the cockpit I could clearly see the ships superstructure at what the RADAR showed to be 6 nautical miles. This was just part of the evidence which had to immediately be recorded.  The actual latitude and longitude of the incident was noted.  There was a tug boat named Draco Best showing on the AIS and all the particulars for that boat were noted. This would prove our AIS was functioning properly.   The true direction of travel of Pulau Layang was noted as well as the direction of travel of Brick House and it’s speed over ground.  Wind direction and wind speed as well as cloud cover was noted and the time of day in local time.  Anything that might be useful in an investigation of the incident and to support my contentions was recorded. When the final report was written, it would include all documentation particulars of our own boat.

But now the problem was, who to report this situation to. Who would care? IMO does not have an enforcement arm so the responsibility rests with the Flag State, the country in which the offending vessel is registered. The Flag State is the only one that can discipline the crew and affect their licenses. Since Pulau Layang is flagged with a home port of Jakarta, Indonesia,  Indonesia is where I would have to hunt down the proper enforcement entity.

I discovered when one Googles, “Global Integrated Shipping Information System”it  will bring up an IMO site.  Click on the “Log In” at the far top right corner ( https://gisis.imo.org/Public/Default.aspx ).  After logging in as a public user, clicking on the icon for “Ship Particulars” I could find the ships “Flag State”, the registered owner, and IMO number. (Another site for finding the owner of a ship is at  www.equasis.org )  Clicking on the icon for “Contact Points” then the radio button for “Flag State contact points for PSC matters”  (PSC stands for Port State Control) then where it says  “–Please Select—“  I could then scroll down to the Flag State of the ship of interest so that the name of the person in charge of enforcement and his contact information is given for filing a report about the ship.1D

It might be a requirement to have ships’ watch keepers to be fluent in speaking English but what about the people working in the foreign government offices of which I would be contacting?  It would seem reasonable to send a report in their own language along with my English version and copies of the most pertinent photographs.  After we docked in the city of Dili, at the first upscale waterfront hotel I walked into, the two front desk workers were very conversant in English.  They were more than happy to put my English report into their electronic translator and spit out a version in Indonesian.  I checked the print out for obvious errors like where the electronic translator  changed the name “Drako Best” to “Drako terbaik”, I changed back to “Drako Best”.  My new friends changed other electronic irregularities into what I hoped was a good mirror of the original report.  If the hotel option had not worked, then the next stop would be the local college where certainly a bilingual student would be willing to work a quick side job.  But not only is it desirable to communicate in the language of the flag country but to make sure all measurements are stated in metric.  Feet, inches,  statute miles are not understood by nearly all of the world.

My report in Indonesian and English, was emailed to the two most promising titled offices on the IMO, Indonesian, contact site.  Since there was no email address for the owner of the ship, printed out copies were mailed to the owner of Pulau Layang as certainly, they would want to know how their ships are operated and being  put in a libelous situation far out to sea.

If the Pulau Layang incident happened in waters of the United States, the nearest Coast Guard station would receive my report and pass it up the chain of command.  The U.S. Coast Guard takes their enforcement capabilities very seriously.  If a violation occurs on any foreign vessel within the U.S. Navigable waters of the U.S., or on board a U.S. vessel anywhere in the world, the Coast Guard can seek and impose enforcement actions including civil and administrative penalties.  Depending on the outcome of an incident, the Coast Guard can also refer a case criminally, such as where one’s negligence leads to death.

If an incident takes place in International waters and does not involve a US vessel, whatever investigative effort done by the U.S. Coast Guard would be forwarded to the Flag State.

But the U.S.C.G and foreign Flag State authorities investigates to complete a finding of facts and corrective measures and does not get involved with civil disputes.  So if there is an actual collision,  the owner of the damaged boat must quickly call an experienced maritime lawyer.

Investigators will take statements from the relevant crew members, review various ship’s documents and in  some situations, the information from the ship’s Voyage Data Recorder. The VDR is a brightly colored box that can withstand high temperatures, explosions, and sinking. The VDR records GPS position and heading, speed, RADAR,  depth, and other operational data . There are 4 microphones installed on the ceiling of the bridge and one on each wing deck to capture conversations and ship sounds.  Those microphones, along with the recording of VHF transmissions, would have certainly captured my repetitious calls and that irritated call made at the ship. Like mom says, “Always speak politely as you never know who is listening.”  VDR information is ultimately stored on a backup drive for at least 30 days before being overwritten.  Some more expensive VDRs record for 60 or 90 days before overwriting. The VDR is required equipment on internationally operated ships.  Pulau Layang, being a domestic carrier, might not have a VDR.

So after my reports were sent, I never heard back from the authorities in Jakarta who’s business it is to investigate such incident reports.  According to the IMO, this is not unusual as some Flag States put enforcement low on their list of priorities.  But I did hear from the General Manager of the company which owns and operates Pulau Layang.  The GM was extremely appreciative to receive the report. He would investigate the matter to determine further training or discipline of the crew.

As more ocean crossing yachts report the errant behavior of commercial ships, this will motivate the ships crew to give a greater consideration of those little plastic sailboats on the horizon. For those little boats, there are avenues for payback and to make our ocean passages safer.