03-21-2005
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Senior Member
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Join Date: Jul 2002
Posts: 1,120
Rep Power: 10
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New Cruising-related Comms
I''m about to lose broadband as our season begins here, but thought I''d mention several threads on the SSCA Discussion Board (http://ssca.org/sscabb/index.php) that people visiting this BB category might find of interest.
One is on the relatively new telephony service, Skype. We''ve used it across ten time zones, sometimes doing ''family conference calling'', to dial phone #s anywhere in Europe or N America, to stay in touch with cruising friends and frail parents scattered all over the place, and the costs are: software - free; on-line calls (dial-up or greater speeds) - free; on-line calls to phone #s - 2 cents (USD)/min. Another joy is that this gives you access to all those 888/800/866 toll free #s that don''t work outside the USA.
We''ve seen a lot of queries and discussion here about how to be ''on-line'' while ''on the boat''. Often this relates to cell phone coverage since many don''t venture beyond coastal cruising. But for those who have the desire to stay connected AND be far from land or anchored in a coral lagoon - and don''t have a huge boat and a huge kitty to fund the geostabilized sat comm systems currently in use - Inmarsat is about to introduce a low-end passive array-based system that will do just this...for a hardware cost equivalent to a Marine SSB system (not that the two are interchangeable).
You''ll find both these discussed in more detail in the Communications section of the SSCA BB, along with a lot of other stuff - in some cases, from people with many years and many, many miles of experience.
Jack
WHOOSH, lying St. Katharine''s Haven, London
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