Motorsailer Sojourn’s Blog

This blog was initially created entirely with the use of a high speed internet connection.

Some of this blog will no doubt need to be revised for text only as our connection speed gets progressively slower (inversely proportional to our distance from WiFi hot spots & cell phone towers).

If you don’t know already, and wish to punish yourself with yet another bit of what will surely be largely irrelevant trivia for you, here’s why:

• As we move aboard the boat (again), connection to the internet will be slower (using a cell phone as a modem). 
• Our friend Darrell tells me there are technology options here (laptop air cards are now faster than my old one (assuming we choose to invest in a new one), an amplifier will yield stronger signals = greater range with consistently higher data transfer speed, and a high gain ground plane antenna will round out this solution); however, I’m note sure I will have time to work this out prior to disembarking. We’ll see…
• After that, as we move out of cell tower range (as little as 50-100 miles offshore in some areas), it gets slower still since the only practical and reliable option is HF (high frequency) radio, that is, marine SSB (single sideband) – which we don’t have yet. Over the air, Graphics take (a LOT) longer than text.
• On what will surely be a comparatively slow connection, I’d rather focus my “air time” on text email & text blog updates and/or graphical weather reports (GRIBs, weather faxes, etc.) IF we can afford an HF email modem, that is.

You can tell this is an area that we are not yet experienced, so we gotta go get some (experience, that is) !