03 Around Australia Challenge shows value of satellite tracking units

by Rob Kothe on 18 Jul 2003 The 03 Around Australia Challenge undertaken by the yacht KAZ and her crew of sailors with disABILITIES has proved to be an excellent test bed for the current and latest satellite tracking units. Kaz was fitted with both Inmarsat C and the Inmarsat D+ tracking units.

While the ‘C’ system, the premium service used by commercial shipping world wide has been around for some years, the D+ system is very new to the southern hemisphere.

KAZ had an Inmarsat C unit, ex-Hobart fitted but during testing just before their
departure it's internal GPS failed. Phil Dickinson, a strong supporter of the group, offered to install his Champagne on Ice unit for the sailors with disABILITIES team.

Phil explains ‘On Champagne we use the Inmarsat C unit primarily as a ‘last ditch’ communication device, it has email send/receive capability and it also serves as a backup
GPS. We also like the ‘Safteynet’ messages that we get and the weather forecast from the B of Met, all free of charge. Its good safety backup for cruising and racing.’

On KAZ the antenna was mounted on the top rail of the pushpit on the starboard side. It is not ideal, being a bit too close to the s/s wind generator pole, but it has worked well for pretty well the whole trip. Our only hiccup was while they were up near Darwin the unit decided to send corrupted poll responses every three minutes. This required intervention by Xantic to
reprogram the unit remotely.

We have the unit set up for ‘ad-hoc’ reporting, that is it will only send a position report when we send a ‘poll’ command to it. This is done by using a ‘telnet’ session to Xantic, across the Internet. Telnet is an ancient character mode terminal facility that works across TCP/IP networks, including the Internet.

On board KAZ this unit has also been the primary system for receiving weather information from Roger Badham ‘Clouds’ and was used for most two way communication, via email, when out of normal mobile phone range. This was a vital link in the 6,500 voyage which covered vast areas without the familiar phone towers. Additionally when the below decks D+ unit was unable to provide tracking data, in the southern ocean, Phil regularly polled the boat and supplied the position to the Sail-World team who used their sked tracking charts to provide boat positions.

Now to the D+ unit, the utilisation of a New Zealand satellite earth station from last November has brought greater access and reception to Inmarsat D+ system in the Pacific region.

These smaller and much less expensive D+ transceivers were used for the first time in last years Sydney to Hobart Ocean Yacht Race.

Ray Kelly of Sat-Trak24, supplied the unit to the KAZ team and also picked up the cost of the 2 hourly polling during the voyage.

Sail-World who have developed marine tracking software, tested and proven over the last 3 years, with a variety of Inmarsat C, Star-track and Argos units, provided the online charts, which displayed on both the sailors with disABILITIES site and on Sail-World.com

Ray Kelly summarises what was discovered

‘The mounting position of the transceiver under the deck (the reused 02 Sydney to Hobart bracket and position) has proved to degrade reception especially when the reception level is at the low end of the spectrum. Also the below deck installation in certain tack positions aligns with deck gear like winches, steering wheels, boom and mast to impedes reception.

When KAZ and her crew were sailing up the North coast of Australia in a stiff breeze, the starboard tack angle had the transceiver facing west away from the Pacific ocean satellite in the east. The transceiver-mounting bracket was re-positioned to take the tack angle into account with instant reception improvement.’

‘This provided an excellent reception trial for the D+ system, in an area of the world it had never been used before. We are very pleased that the North American designers of the SAT--TRAK24 transceivers have responded with improvements as a result from experiences gained from this event. A new antenna design and implementation that will provide good reception at a much lower angle to the horizon.

Reception to and from the stationary satellites positioned over the Indian and Pacific on the equator will further be enhanced with a firmware modification that will allow a transceiver to monitor and select the satellite providing the best reception. Naturally a permanently installed unit should be externally mounted and this will provide reception every bit as good as the Inmarsat C unit’

The SAT--TRAK24 Inmarsat D+ system is well within the serious yacht owners budget at $990.00 (inc GST) when compared to the Inmarsat C system at around $4,000.00.

As SAT_TRAK24 has many applications for business and recreational subscribers, it provides the first low cost, 24hr-position live monitoring and messaging satellite service ever seen in Australia.

The new D+ system provides full navigation capability and when linked to other marine instrumentation through the NMEA standard marine communications interface and connected to a PC with interface graphics can provide a total ‘Glass Bridge’ marine solution.

This can be utilised by owners and charter boat businesses to enable remote monitoring and assistance, performance and position data monitoring and logging for current and future analysis.’

Other applications include security (24 hour live monitoring) for unauthorised entry or movement along with detection of high bilge levels, power low, battery switches incorrectly set, drifted from mooring, smoke detection etc.

Of considerable interest to sailors and their families is the person overboard alarm

By November 03 SAT_TRAK24 expects to have a person overboard button operational on its D+ units.

This is a derivative of the lone/remote work button. If a person goes overboard there two possible functions.

1. The person operates the button (pinned to vest or jacket)
2. 2. If the person is not able to operate the button the system will detect that the button is no longer in range.

When either of the two events occur the a person overboard transmission immediately occurs with the boats position (lat and long), boat name and crew member (assigned to device) name are transmitted via the SAT--TRAK24 satellite transceiver system, also an audible alarm is raised on the boat and if the boat has a SAT--TRAK24 navigation display the position is recorded on the chart.

Each crew member would be assigned a button which has a unique code (up to 65,000) identifying the individual crew member on a boat.’

It’s clear that with the launch of the new low cost Inmarsat D+ system in the southern hemisphere, that the use of satellite communications will dramatically increase in both cruising and racing and this will add another safety and communications for mariners across the southern hemisphere.

For more information www.sat-trak24.com