SSB or not

[CarlF]

Get an InReach before a Sat-phone. Even if you keep the SSB - get an InReach.

I wouldn't go offshore without mine (in anyone's boat). I'm even thinking of selling the SSB because I hardly ever use it these days. Maybe I'm antisocial but I find the nets tedious. And offshore, I like feeling beyond civilization. At anchor I now am rarely without good Internet with a local SIM (or Google FI).

I got rid of my old sat-phone as the service was expensive, it dropped calls all the time and was temperamental. The InReach is dirt cheap. Always works (at least for me). And paired with a smartphone is as easy as sending text messages ashore. Mine works fine without an external antenna sitting on the chart table below. I leave it plugged in and always on. Friends and family love this because they can reach me anytime - they worry much less.

And as anyone under age 30 will tell you (and our president too), if you can't say what you want to say in 160 characters, then it's not worth saying.

I use the InReach weather. I wish it was a whole GRIB but If I'm worried about a nasty forecast, i'll ask have a friend ashore to send me a more detailed forecast - sometimes this takes three or four Inreach messages but at $0.10 a message....

Finally, the InReach is far better in a distress situation than a sat-phone. Waterproof, three day battery. Can be taken into a liferaft. Since it provides two two way communication with SAR, it's a better EPIRB. I would only activate my EPIRB if I didn't get a quick response from the InReach distress center.

[Seafun]

A perfect cross section of opinions and experience, this has really helped. From this thread and chatting to my cruising buddy in The Caribbean I will keep the SSB on board along with its 30’ tall antenna. Before making large passage I will spend the time to test and learn it. In the mean time I now need to investigate Inreach vs Sat phone. I am very glad I posted this as I have learnt plenty, thanks.

[Suijin]

Originally Posted by Kenomac

Note: We have a high quality SSB onboard which hasn’t been used in over six years.

No wonder you can't hear anyone on it.

[TJ D]

We have an old SSB that we also never use. I used to like the nets a lot, but have for some reason not used them as much in the last 10 years or so. I don't know why, exactly.



These days, the Inmarsat Fleet Broadband handles our communications. It's a great piece of kit, but it's expensive. We have one of the old, prepaid SIM cards, so it's ok on cost, $2/day is the minimum, and we typically don't exceed that for all of our comms and weather.



They've done away with the prepaid program now (for shame...), so I would be doing an Iridium phone at this point. The data rate's not great, but it does email and GRIB's just fine. That's the way I'd go these days, unless I had some other reason to want to be on SSB.


On a minimal budget, a ham rig with Winlink would be a great choice.