Hi Richard, One nautical mile is 2000 yards. One cable is a tenth of a nautical mile, 200 yards--or to put it into really simple terms , about nine cricket pitches..... Ian and Judy, Pen Azen, SM 302, Hamble

To: amelyachtowners@...
From: richard03801@...
Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 16:10:33 +0000
Subject: Re: [Amel] AIS

We fully agree the only way to get a ships response is to call the by have your position course and speed in front of you. Say your intentions clearly and slowly. In many miles at sea we've found this works well. In fact if you listen in on the bridge to bridge chatter they do the same.

We use a stand alone AIS that works well and give us a stable display and a single antenna with a spliter. Add an Icom digital VHF with a full feature mike at the helm as well as chart plotter radar. Now that we have AIS we can use the radar pause feature to save battery power. We cycle the radar every 20 min. Unless we have weather or targets on screen.
Does anyone know how far a cable is????

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

-----Original Message-----
From: "rossirossix4" <rossidesigngroup@...>
Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 15:54:55
To: <amelyachtowners@...>
Subject: [Amel] AIS

I asked my daughter about MMSI calls to ships. She is a ships bridge officer--2nd officer--with extensive experience in the Strait of Malacca, Gibraltar and other crowded places. She says that they "never" get MMSI calls and that it would be "weird" to get one. (This, in my opinion doesn't mean it would be wrong to use it to "ring em up" in an urgent situation.

She did say that if you use the ships name it definitely gets their attention and they should respond to you. Also give your distance, your bearing from them (the reciprocal what you show for them), description of your boat and your intentions.

For those of us who need to replace our non-DSC fixed VHFs anyway, Standard Horizon has a relatively inexpensive ($315 street price) VHF--Matrix AIS GX2100 with a built in AIS receiver and screen. The available remote mic (maybe in your cockpit) also displays the AIS screen, which shows the normal AIS calculated data plus the name of the vessels, kind of handy at 3:00 am--see em, call em. http://www.standardhorizon.com/indexVS.cfm?cmd=DisplayProducts&ProdCatID=83&encProdID=F858763BB81027701141A0167DE2A031&DivisionID=3&isArchived=0

Standard Horizon sent me a picture of the remote mic displaying an AIS screen display--again, handy in the cockpit.

Class B transceiver also sounds good. They consume very little power (I covered this in a previous posting).

Bob
Brittany de la Mer








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