Send an email message from an Iridium 9555 Sat Phone

In my last post, I talked about how to send twits from the middle of the Atlantic ocean using the twitter email relay client twittermail. But there is still a bit of a problem. Sending emails from a wee boat can be a bit of a pain. Usually you have to pull out the PC and/or fire up the SSB and cross your fingers a bit. If you have tons of cash you might even have a live imersat connection. Well for 69 cents you can sen an email using the text message feature of the new Iridium Sat phones.

Many cell phone companies (as well as Iridium) allow you to start your text message with an email address followed by a space and then your message. The final message can only be 139 characters minus the length of your email message. Not a lot, put plenty of room for a tweet.
Using the Iridium 9555 as an example, you would first create your message, such as:

mytwittermailid@twittermail.com Wow what a great day of sailing! 140nm under sunny skies.

To create the @ symbol you have to press the * key and then select from the symbols. After your message is compiled you hit 'Send'. A new menu comes up and you select the 'New recipient' option. In the number field, enter +*2 and press 'OK'. Now press the 'Send' message and you are good to go. In our example, the text message got relayed to email which got sent to twittermail which relayed it to our twitter account http://www.twitter.com/indigoSV.

Sounds simple. It seems like it took us forever to figure it out.


From Indigo in the BVI … I am outa here!

How do you Twitter from the middle of the Atlantic?

One of the things that I suppose keeps you up in the middle of the night is the burning question: “How do you Twitter when you are in the middle of the Ocean?”  Good question and I’m glad you asked. It turns out the answer is relatively simple, but it took a long time to get to that answer.

Why Twitter From The Ocean?

One thing that is good about Twitter is that it was designed to operate with very short messages. It’s bandwidth requirements are circa 1983. This just happens to be the bandwidth that you can expect out in the middle of the ocean. So it fits right in with our bandwidth availability. Another thing is that you can broadcast to many people at the same time. No pesky email lists. Your friends and fans can just check out your updates. They can even have their updates sent to their cell phone so they can always know what you are up too.

Okay, You’ve Sold me, but how do I do it?

The devil is in the details. The first obvious thing you might think of is using a satellite phone to text message updates directly to twitter. Heck, they have an international number that you can text too, so it should just work … right?  Of course, not. The problem is that twitter changed the way that you register phones with their service. It used to be that you just typed in your number on their web site and you were good to go. Now it requires a complex back and forth handshake between your cell phone and their servers. That’s great if you are in one of their supported countries, but doesn’t even come close to working for everyone else in the world. And what if I’m a cheapskate and only have a SSB connection?The secret is to use your email to post a twitter update. First you need to enable an email relay such as twittermail. Once you sign up they will give you a relay email address (foobar@twittermail.com). To twit you simple send an email message to your relay address. Make sure the message is all text.

And finally

As an added bonus, you can send your location using this message-> L: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=18.426,-64.61. North Latitude is a positive number, South is negative. East Longitude is positive and West Longitude is negative. Click the link, and it will bring up the current location of Indigo.
ciao,
andy

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Pre Game Time for the BVIs

For the past couple of weeks several of us have been preparing to move a boat from Tortola to Cape Canaveral. This boat was purchased by a friend of mine about a month ago and we are going to try and bring it back up to the Pacific Northwest via Florida (and stick it on a truck). Planing this event remotely has been kind of a bitch compounded by the fact that each of the four crew live at least on hours drive away from each other. To make things easier, we have been using Google Sites to coordinate all of our trip information - from meal planning to emergency contact information, it is all there.
My task has been setting the communications to the external world so that all of our friends and family can stay in touch.


The first trick is to figure out the medium to get all of those pesky ones and zero from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to the internet. There are several solutions available, but for us it came down to a Satellite phone or using a Single Side Band (SSB) radio for email. The satellite phone has the advantage that it is easy to set up, you can call people on it, and you can send SMS (text) messages with it. The downside is that it is slow (2400kb) and relatively expensive (~1$/minute - 1$/15k). The SSB, on the other hand, is cheap and already installed on the boat. The disadvantage is that is is even slower (500b), complex to operate, and may not even work on this boat.

Because of the time constraints, we decided on using the satellite phone. I can get this solution working at home, with all of the benefits of the internet. The other good thing about this solution is that it gave us SMS messaging. This allows us to easily post updates to ... twitter. For about seventy cents we can text a message to twitter and easily send status update information to friends and family. Heck you can follow us right now at: http://twitter.com/indigosv.

The second way we are going to push location data out to a server called yotreps. This service was set up to help weather forecasters get a better picture of local sea conditions using boats as mobile weather bouy. You can access yotreps and our boat Indigo here and via google maps at shiptrack. The way yotrpes works is that you send them a rather cryptic email with your local conditions in it. Here is a sample entry.

YOTREPS
20/10/2009

| BOAT  | WIND  | SWELL |   |    |    |
No|   CALL |TIME|   POSITION     |Cse|Spd|       |       |Cld|Bar |tend|
|        | UTC|   Lat. Lng.    | °T|Kts|Dir|Kts|Dir| Ht| % | hPa|    |
---|--------|----|----------------|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|----|----|
1|WDAL7LO |2215|18 26 N  64 37 W|230|0.0| NE|  3|  N|0.0| 30|1011|   +|

Comments:
Waiting for BJ to Buy Me

Spring Cleaning

Boats Decay - constantly. The constant motion of the wind, tide and waves causes boats to disintegrate at an alarming rate.
When I first bought my boat, I had high ambitions to install all kinds of cool electronics gizmos on her. After all, we do what we know, and electrical engineers, which I am, like electrical gizmos. I was going to install a cool stereo with cockpit speakers and maybe a flat screen TV plus a cool chartplotter. And what about that wireless NMEA repeater I was going to design? That was five years ago.
Since I purchased her, I have been fighting a never ending battle against entropy. I've replaced the head (yuck) and replaced the head discharge hose (really yuck). I've replaced batteries, chargers, bits of wire, pins, flares, sails, rigging, furlers, zincs, raw water strainers and hot water heaters. I even manage to scratch one item off my wish list and replaced my busted stereo. All in all, I have a list of 127 items that I've futzed with.
In May of 2007 I quit updating the list. It's not that I've quit doing projects, I've just quit keeping track of them. I mean, what's the point when the list is infinite and growing? I was once stripping old varnish off of my bow sprit at the dock, and this couple walks by. She says to her companion, "I would just love to own a boat. I would just lie around and read all day." Sure.
Each year I've been trying to do a non-maintenance project. Last year I installed a furnace (which is awesome - it has really extended the boating season). During this process, I finally installed a circuit breaker for the windlass. Only I didn't hook it up (got busy) until this year when I started my annual spring boat projects. Now these projects have a little more urgency. My insurance company required me to get a boat survey. A boat survey is where you pay a guy to tell you all of the things that you already know are wrong with your boat. Then the insurance company sends you a nice note telling you that you really ought to fix the items on the survey or you won't be covered. You have two months. This may seem like a long time, but how big of a dent can you make in an infinite list in two months? Most of the items in the survey list are not on my list. Items such as #12: No Bell - required for vessels of 12 meters or more. Okay, my boat isn't over 12 meters, so what is the problem? Or how about #13 - No Day Shape. For those that don't know, a sailboat is required to fly a conical day shape, apex downward when under power (72 COLREGS Rule 30) & a vessel at anchor shall exhibit where it can be seen an all-round white light or one ball. I don't know about you, but I have never seen either of these shapes outside of a coast guard rule book. Next time you are at the book store, check out your sailing magazine. See any day shapes. And why is this a condition of insurance?
I digress though.
This year's non-maintenance project was to hook up the hot water heater to the engine. Imagine nice hot showers while at anchor. I did hook up the heater and found yet another problem - a broken motor mount. No one else noticed it, and I suspect it is more important than that inverted cone. After I fix that, I'm going to work on those speakers.

From 2009_03_20 - Boat Works