Our goal for next summer is to be able to pick up weatherfax via radio. There's no way we'll rely on satellite again for downloading grib files. Our winter is dedicated to learning more about this sort of thing, and doing experiments.
@neauoire Any thoughts on how you'll recieve and decode the transmissions yet?
@cathos we've started collecting notes, there seems to be a sort of gradient here, from usb gizmos we could use near the shore, to quite cumbersome antennas to allow us to grab the signal when we're offshore.
We've got a little collection of software to handle the transmission, it's mostly windows stuff but I found two that'll work on linux. We haven't really done much experimentation in that so far so it's all fresh
@neauoire @cathos You don't really need any fancy antenna to receive wefax on HF. On a boat you're supposed not to have too much noise. You just put up a small wire dipole on the mast and you're good. As others said, just use fldigi and an old HF receiver. I just received this map on 11MHz with my kiwiSDR.
Here you find the schedules:
https://www.weather.gov/media/marine/rfax.pdf
@neauoire @cathos regarding which radio to get, I'd suggest something like an ICOM IC-7100. It's not marine grade (they cost 3X!), but it's HF, VHF, UHF, the display is separated from the main unit, it has an integrated USB sound card so you connect the linux pc with fldigi just with a single cable. So, if you can install it in a protected spot on the boat, I'd say it's a perfect little radio for your kind of use.
