How delightful to wake up in a quiet, peaceful, empty boat! I'm starting to feel like a human being again.
It rained most of the night and morning, so I filled the tank with fresh, sweet rainwater.
Spent three or four hours trying to get the new weatherfax to work. It requires very careful tuning and excellent reception. I tried various frequencies and adjustments but got nothing but specks. By noon, I had just about concluded that it was defective, and I was thinking of phoning the company I bought it from. All of a sudden, to my amazement, here came a weather chart! I could scarcely believe my eyes. Granted, it's sort of fuzzy and hard to read, but at least it is a weather chart. It's easy to recognize the various states, including North Carolina, and it has a zoom feature, so you can magnify the area you want. If I can get it to print out on paper, it should be even easier to read. Later, I even managed to get some Morse code, which is even trickier to adjust. There was a lot of noise, giving extraneous characters, but some of it was readable. So far, however, I haven't been able to bring in Navtex at all. I don't understand why they gave it such a low frequency--only 518 kHz. A higher frequency would be much easier to receive. I got the weatherfax at 20.015 MHz. I'd like to be able to get Navtex, because it describes the weather in words instead of pictures.
Expected Roy back around noon. When he wasn't here by two, I began to get worried. Fortunately, he showed up, safe and sound, around 2:30 or 3:00. He had taken his time and done some shopping. He was thrilled when he found out we'd gotten a weatherfax.
No comments:
Post a Comment