[ih] Internet at Sea

[Bob Hinden]

Very interesting thread.   I have a personal perspective on the Internet at Sea.   I have been sailing from San Francisco to Hawaii on the Pacific Cup (https://pacificcup.org <https://pacificcup.org/>) sailboat race since 2004.  I have done the race five times and have seen the technical choice's evolve quite a bit.

Unlike large vessels, I had a much smaller power and money budget.    The first couple of races in the 2004 and 2008, I used Single Side band HF radio using the sailmail system (https://sailmail.com <https://sailmail.com/>) with pactor modems.  This was text based email and encoded weather forecast GRIB files.  Not very fast (~2000baud on a good day) but it did work.   There were Inmarsat Fleet broadband solutions available at that time that could do 150kbps, but the expense of the equipment and data cost ($25/mbyte) exceeded my budget.

In the 2014 I moved to using an Iridium phone with an external antenna.    This wasn’t much faster, but was more reliable.   

In 2016 and 2022, I installed an Iridium Go.   This was a bit faster but also had an improved connection via WiFi interface and was designed for data.   With this, there could be limited web access, but only for very simple web pages.   I mostly used it for text email and grib files.  We were able to download bigger grib files that improved our weather routing.  The WiFi interface also allowed crew members to send emails from their phones.   The previous solutions were tied to a single computer.

The introduction of Starlink has changed everything.  We first saw it on the larger boats with bigger power and money budgets.   Now we are seeing it on many more boats.   I suspect that for the race next summer it will probably be on the majority of the boats doing the race.

This has created a new set of problems.   While it is great for communication, weather data, and uploading videos from each boat to social media, skippers are finding the that the off watch crew are spending a lot of time on social media instead of sleeping.    

Bob


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