Monday, August 3, 2015

Many ways to communicate

As we sit in Brunswick I'm trying to figure out a way to get Facebook posts posted without wifi. We have the Iridium Go hotspot which sends texts and emails without much trouble at all. We were able to post to Facebook, but the stoops at FB removed the email posting feature. Iridium said they are working on a fix but I jumped ahead and figured one out.

Twitter. Yes, I now tweet. When I post a tweet it automatically goes to facebook. I have no other reason to be on twitter other than to do a facebook post from afar. So, no I will not be following the likes of The Donald or Kim Kardashian to read what or who they had for breakfast. I will have a widget on the Blog that shows my tweets. If you don't have Facebook you can still see no more than 140 characters of wisdom from me just by looking at the blog. Things like, "These waves are high. I think I'm gonna hurl", or "Our last 4 slices of bread and I burned the grilled cheese". You might also like, "There's a guy next to us with an actual Peg Leg!", or "They're French Canadian and they're all in Bikinis, and waving me over!", but more likely, "Deb took away my binoculars".

So, we most likely have things covered on the communication front. We have an unlocked phone with no contract. We have sat wifi from which we can make calls, text, email, tweet and post to Facebook and the blog. We get grib files through email and view them with Pocket Grib or Sail Grib. Chris Parker emails us every night and we can get text weather reports. We also have SOS features on three separate sat devices.



We appear good to go unless the USA pisses someone off enough to have them wipe out our satellites, and if that happens there will be worse things to worry about.

I didn't mention SSB because well, we don't have it. The cost of getting outfitted and learning to use it was prohibitive. There is a need for it though and I'm glad other cruisers have it. At one point last season my daughter was trying to get a hold of us while we were in the Exumas. She posted to Facebook and our friends on Magnolia saw this and used the SSB cruisers net to find us and get a message to us. We had a cruiser dinghy over and tell us that Nicole needed to talk to us. This was pretty awesome. Nicole tried to reach us on the sat but we were only turning the thing on in the evenings. With the install of an external antenna this will change.

That's all I have as I try to get back into the world of blogging. 

Have a wonderful day.

Cheers!
PB


3 comments:

  1. Ahhh, I will share this post with the captain in charge of geekery. I do believe an Iridium Go may be on my Christmas list. When we get to an area where there are more cruisers who talk to each other, perhaps we could rely on the old 'community phone line' like your daughter did. Alas, when cruising the west coast of Vancouver Island, we saw precious few other sailboats except when we were close to Tofino, which I prefer to keep as far away from as possible. Family not being able to contact me makes my anxiety spin up. Thanks for the post and the info.

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    1. Friends of our have the Delorme unit and they are happy with it's performance as well.

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    2. I so love your "captain in charge of geekdry"

      Deb
      SV Kintala
      www.theretirementproject.blogspot.com

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