Communications technical blog
Thursdays Child
Robin & Joanna Minchin
Sun 24 Aug 2014 21:17
Thank you for reading our blogsite, it is amazing to us onboard that so many people are enjoying our adventure on Thursday's Child. We have had a number of enquires about different aspects of the trip and below is an answer to a question we have had about the communications we have setup onboard the boat.
Communications on Thursday's Child
We have three methods of keeping in touch with home and writing the blog. We have two computers onboard, one is a netbook and the other is an old 15"laptop. We also have an old ipad donated to us and setup with films and games for the children, plus a new Samsung android tablet which we have found useful for emails, but invaluable in navigating using Navtronics. If you decide to use Navtronics do upload all the areas you are interested in while WIFI is available.
Generally, we use the netbook at the nav station for a chart package and blog writing. The laptop is dedicated to the sat phone as the settings are different. However, I have set up both computers to not download updates etc. As they seem to want to do this every time we log on (See the Mailasail website for a good guide of how to do this).
Most used so far is an unlocked MIFI device made by Huawei (E5330) (bought from Amazon for about £35) which provides WIFI to all the devices. In the UK we had an Orange UK SIM card that we also used in France. Now we are in Spain we bought a Spainish Orange SIM card which we hope will last longer. 25euros gives us 2gb for a month of use. We generally use it to get GRIB files (for weather) through our satellite service provider using (a free download) nimble navigator. Plus download and send emails. You can surf the web, but we found the data runs out quite fast if you do that too much on the web. For the blog we resize any photo's (to 500pixels in the long dimension).
Just before we left we set up a new email address which we use onboard, as our normal personal emails have now become bloated with junk mail and so we would be wasting bandwidth downloading spam. So far, it has worked well and we keep our emails to a minimum.
We also have an secondhand Motorola 9500 satellite phone with a modem that attaches to it. This is only used when we are offshore to give our position and short messages which we send and receive through Iridium, using our Mailasail airtime provider. It works fine for collecting GRIBs and short text only emails (so we only give out the email link to family and a select few). Upload and download is really slow and expensive at £600 for 500 minutes for the year. I have requested a GRIB sent emails and downloaded the grib in under a minute, but it can easily take 4 minutes. So you can see that the Mifi is much better for uploading the blog, especially when photographs are uploaded.
However, dispite the cost, it is nice to know we can talk to others via the satellite phone if we are in trouble wherever we are on the ocean, and we have direct access to a friendly A&E consultant 24hrs a day.
Lastly we use either a netbook or the Samsung tablet to Skype and upload when we visit cafe's with internet. It is magic to be able see those at home and chat using the Skype.
At one stage I had been advised to set up single sideband radio on the boat for communications and so that the children could communicate with other boats with children on them. At the time I could not justify the cost and so far I am happy with what we have onboard. Maybe as we venture further I may change my thoughts about SSB. As yet we have not met any other family boats, so we shall see!