A friend of mine recently lost his boat off Spitzbergen. He set off his EPIRB.
As a matter of interest, the first his wife heard of this was not a call from an MRCC, but from GEOS who spotted that the EPIRB was linked to a SPOT owner, even though he hadn 't pressed the SOS button on the SPOT.

[quote="simoncurrin" post=698]David,
Fine I will stay below 50 characters and will keep an eye on the 4 and 5 day forecast and will let you know of major changes ahead. Have a good trip.
Simon[/quote]

Simon,
Sorry, that didn 't work out as planned. Five days out, I lost the Bluetooth connection with my iPad, and nothing would restore it. I was reduced to improvising a bit to send out cryptic messages to selected contacts.

The tracking worked as it should, and shows me as anchored in Hilo after a straightforward three week passage.

I 've been talking to Nick Farrell at YB, and all credit to the people there, they are trying to find out what the reason for the failure was. I have upgraded my iPad software from iOS 5 to 6 which has restored the Bluetooth connection, but I 'm mystified as to why it worked with iOS 5 for a time, and then quit. Also, the battery is losing charge much faster than it should, and we are trying to find out why that is.

Nick tells me that there is a plan to use the USB socket to connect to a laptop for messaging as well as to charge, and this in my view will be a much better and more reliable system than via Bluetooth to a tablet or phone.

I 'm convinced that this device is the way I want to go, for the minimal mid-ocean comms that I 'm seeking, but there seems to be a little more work to do before it will be 100% reliable.

Just to confirm - this looks like a faulty unit (a battery problem and bluetooth problem), and we 've already agreed to swap it with the latest model of the unit just as soon as we have them in stock.

We do have plenty of people using the Bluetooth & app successfully with the YB3.

David,
I am relieved to hear that it was a hardware problem and not that the forecasts were complete rubbish! Did "Predict Wind" come close to what you experienced in the first few days? They warned that there was a paucity of data available to build the GRIBs in the area that you were sailing so presumably they were a bit hit and miss? Anyway it was fun watching you inch north on Google earth. Do let me know if you ever want any minimalist forecasts again.
Simon

[quote="simoncurrin" post=720]David,
I am relieved to hear that it was a hardware problem and not that the forecasts were complete rubbish! Did "Predict Wind" come close to what you experienced in the first few days? They warned that there was a paucity of data available to build the GRIBs in the area that you were sailing so presumably they were a bit hit and miss? Anyway it was fun watching you inch north on Google earth. Do let me know if you ever want any minimalist forecasts again.
Simon[/quote]

Simon,
I have to say that the forecasts didn 't bear much relation to the reality. Probably because of lack of data, as you say. I got winds that varied from NNE to ENE on a fairly regular pattern for the first five days, and I couldn 't tie that in with what you were sending me. I think for the future, all I 'd want to be told in these waters is that there was a hurricane bearing down on me. For the passage to Alaska next year, perhaps a better format would be "Low [millibars], position [lat,long], heading [direction].

This being a standard Tradewind passage, there was never going to be a major hiccup in the weather. I might have wanted somebody to cheer me up by telling me that I was nearly out of the Doldrums, but even that might not have shown up, if the data was scarce.
David.

Oh, rats! :sick:
Now I 've gone and bought an Iridium GO!, I 've just noticed that there is now a Yellowbrick for permanent installation:
https://www.ybtracking.com/products-yb3i
which might - just might - have been all I needed, if it turned out to be more reliable than the handheld YB I had.