Night 2 : Problems problems or xxxxing Electronics
Purple Mist
Skipper: Kate Cope
Sun 18 Sep 2022 04:29
Night 2 : Problems problems or xxxxing Electronics
So for 24hrs I’ve been struggling with Sat Comms both the Handheld Iridium and the new (and very expensive) Certus I’m using for data and blogging.
The handheld did a trip round Britain last month aboard Polished Manx with Kuba so I thought that a good enough test. However I realised when in its cradle aboard it had no signal. This one proved a reasonably easy fix . After digging out the new electrical spares box from under the bunk we traced the issue to the original aerial installed 4 years ago. Probably a corroded connection. Luckily I brought the back up aerial which is now velcroed to pinky and perky penguins perch so it has a view of the sky. Sounds easy but it took quite an bit of testing various configurations ..but hey we have time . Also wrong was the SMS set up , sorry Kuba there is an outbox of unsent messages.
The Certus was proving more tricky , it very much looked like it was working so what else to try. I was trying weather in expedition on the laptop and mail from my phone. Neither was working and yet both of these worked last week. I rang Mum on it and at it was working for voice calls .
Beware for the boring bit now but the sailors may find useful. As neither worked I started with the Certus and Redbox but in fact both were fine. Issue was the files sizes, I’d only tried small files and it seems on a bigger weather file expedition falls over and you need to use squid directly. This fact, that Richard told me last week, emerged from the deep recess of my mind after a Kip …and 12hrs of thinking . Opened squid and voila! Weather …note use of the French as we all use French weather …so much better models…
Anyway mail , so from 4 years ago Azab I recalled you need to download a simple mail programme to get mail on the laptop …yep that was the fix the test message of “You better work now boyo” was received !
Then finally I managed to fix mail on my phone by switching off SSL which means I can do piccies with the blog.
Here is Grandma Clanger talking to her fellow Clangers on the moon!
