I read through the TransPac 2009 (full crew transpac out of Los Angeles), and rather like what they are doing with daily checkins within the fleet:

http://www.transpacrace.com/docs/200...PYC2009_SI.pdf

8AM SSB check-in across the fleet with dedicated communications yacht Alaska Eagle (ex-Flyer) to provide your 6AM position, and the interesting wrinkle is that Alaska Eagle will also accept positions received via email from the racers (e.g., email sent from the racer to the comm boat).

This might help our racing comm boat out as well, as it provides an additional path to the comm boat (redundancy) that does not appear to increase unduly the work of the comm boat.

A downside is that the positions are 2 hours old (not 30 minutes old), and the time required by the comm boat to establish an email connection via SSB & sailmail/winlink. I do not know if Iridium email is quicker to establish than SSB (I have not used Iridium email).

The LA TransPac is requiring SSB radios and you need to be in on the roll call in case local weather conditions are requested by the comm boat. This also means that there is a feedback loop for emailed positions: if Alaska Eagle reads out your emailed position over the radio then you know the email was received; if Alaska Eagle asks for your position then you know the email did not get through in time.

We've tried having racers telephone the comm boat via sat phone directly (that did not work too well), and route positions through the RC and back to the comm boat (that was a lot of extra hassle and headache). It strikes me that emailing data directly to the comm boat has good upside potential with minimal additional effort on the part of RC and the comm boat.

We would require SSB for check-in, and in addition allow competitors to email the position data in advance. This does require that the comm boat have email capability and if the email fails to get through it's no big deal. It also allows a competitor that has an iridium/email gateway setup on board to continue checking in even if the SSB radio goes down (that's the redundancy part).

What do people think? I think it's an interesting idea.

- rob/beetle