Osaka Cup-Satphones and Weather
Escapade16.4.13 2052hrs
One of the continuing frustrations is the tedium of accessing email. The inmarsat prepay system that we have is not user friendly. It works a bit like the pre internet era email such as compuserve dial up. But not so robust!
To send an email, you open a software system called Xgate which will give you access to the satellite. From there you open an email client, write your email, and "send" it, which in this case means it goes from the email client to Xgate. It cannot now be recalled. Then you go back to Xgate and hit "start". Xgate now slowly rumbles through many stages of connection, laboriously telling you what step it is at. Maybe 20 steps to see the phone, make it dial, find the right devices, get authorised and logged in etc. It can fail arbitrarily at any stage, and tell you something useful like "remote computer rejected your connection", which could mean "you've run out of credit".
The most common failures are at any stage after about two minutes into the connection when inmarsat comes back typically with "#10054 receive error", and shuts down the connection. Those two minutes of phone connection time are charged at the standard $ per minute. And nothing to show for it. Or worse, many of the errors leave the connection open, and you are continuously charged until you manually disconnect, often needing to remove the phone from it's holder to break the connection. We've run out all our credit before now by failing to check that disconnection has happened.
We think we know now what #10053 or 10054 really means. There is limited bandwidth on the satellite. So usage is prioritised. And at a guess, prepay data is at the end of the line. So 10053/4 means "Your low priority request didn't make it onto the scale. Try again later. And here's the bill for that attempt." By trial and error, we've discovered that the best time for access is after the US west coast has gone to bed, and optimum at around midnight to 3 a.m. But even then it can take half a dozen attempts to get emails sent and received. Emails are only received after any in the outbox are sent. If there's a batch of emails to receive, then they all come in one go, and either all succeed or all fail. However one good thing about the software is that if a failure occurs during email receipt, then the system remembers where it got to in the download, and picks up from there when you eventually fight your way to a new connection!
Given what we now know of the usability of Inmarsat in the version we have it, we would look for another solution. I wonder how the Iridium users are getting on.
So with that background, you'll understand the next step of this blog.
Six days ago, the weather was looking good and stable across this whole area, and was a good match for the expectation off the wind roses. So five days (nights) ago, we decided we didn't need the hassle of getting a fresh forecast. Four nights ago, we couldn't get a connection for love nor money. Three nights ago, we ran out of credit. Two nights ago we got the forecast, and there staring us in the face was the horror of a hole in the wind that we just could do nothing to avoid. And yesterday we fell in.
So that's why we stopped.
As I write this, we've just come round the bottom corner of Pagan, with it's active volcano belching steam and smoke, and picked up NE 6kts, so we're sailing properly again. There are more holes and variations in the wind over the next few days, so I'll send this now with my grib file requests, and then see wht the new gfs says.
Let me rephrase that. I've got some time in hand, so I'll sit and keep pressing the "start" button until we either get the connection or run out of credit again!
Joey
