Hi Gang. This is my first blog entry since I arrived in Hawaii on Monday. A few weeks ago, I bought a satellite phone on Bill's behalf and I spent yesterday and today setting it up. The first picture shows our magnetic "car" antenna, as adapted for a boat. Since we do not have a steel dodger, I acquired a 12" pizza pan at Foodland and attached it to the dodger handrails with parachute cord. This gives us a spot to "stick" our antenna. The second picture shows the phone in its stand at the nav station with its rat's nest of umbilical cords attacked. There is an antenna cable at the top, a data cable in front near the bottom, and the charger cable sticks out of the bottom. Yesterday, I had a lot of trouble getting the phone to make data calls, but with plenty of support from several people, we got it working. It's about 4800 baud, so it should allow us to upload big files like photos and videos to this blog. But it costs $1.25 a minute, so we will probably not be using it for normal emails. For that, we'll probably stick to Sailmail which is much slower, but it's already paid for. So, enjoy the pictures, and stay tuned for more. Your comments are aways welcome. ~Chris Doutre
Chris has been struggling with the satellite data link but other functions of the phone are working fine. Some of them almost too good. For example: His unique antenna arrangement is working extremely well, but sometimes without asking the phone will spontaneously dial out for pizza.
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