responding; volunteer aid is a core tenet of amateur radio. We’ve listened to some dramatic calls this year as net controllers assisted cruisers with needs from major gear failures to medical emergencies on board. To reach a wide audience, daily boater nets can get the word spread quickly to a relevant audience, to relay information such as when a boat is overdue for arrival. To reach help any time, certain frequencies (such as 2.182 MHz and 14.300 MHz) dedicated to mariner support have nearly constant traffic, and others are monitored by the US Coast Guard as well as the Navy or Coast Guard services in other nations. Even if you don’t have the right frequencies handy, it’s not hard to scan the bands and find a conversation you can break into to get help. The most common use for on
board SSB is boater’s nets; these nets are the primary way the community of cruisers keeps in touch. Participating in marine radio nets is how cruisers find each other, and share weather and destination information. It connects the cruiser community, putting boaters over a wide geographic area in contact-
often establishing friendships before you share an anchorage.
Our Lessons Learned The fundamental difference is
that satellite phones offer one-to-one communication and SSB provides one- to-many communication. While the simplicity of a sat phone is appealing, the cruisers that we know who rely only on sat phones become disconnected from the cruising community. Most of us go cruising to be disconnected, but we’ve learned that listening in on SSB nets now and then provides a wealth of information, ranging from anchorages not in the guide books to where to find a refrigeration repair ship in La Paz, Mexico.
Friends of ours who are both active
radio users and have a sat phone on board had a scare last year when their son was stung on the neck by a scorpion. They were in a remote stretch of Baja in Mexico, and concerned about getting diagnosis and treatment. What did they do first? They reached for their sat phone but only so that they could call a specific ham radio operator they knew to more rapidly initiate a network of
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www.downwindmarine.comwww.downwindmarine.com 48° NORTH, JULY 2010 PAGE 35
radio-based support for help with their emergency. Another consideration is that
both sat phones and SSB are complex electronic devices and used in a harsh environment. Both can and do fail. This became profoundly clear to us when our single-sideband radio stopped transmitting partway through our passage from Mexico to French Polynesia. We could hear just fine, but could not be heard or email our position reports. We still prefer SSB for primary long range communications, but in hindsight would have budgeted for a second-hand satellite phone with small cache of minutes as a backup. For most cruisers, expanding their sailing horizon beyond the coast means investing in one or both of these communications options. Needs, priorities, and budget will give each cruiser a different criteria to evaluate and choose.
“Totem” is currently cruising
in the South Pacific. Follow along at:
www.sv-totem.com
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