Weather fax

A few weeks ago I learned about weather fax. We used a little shortwave receiver listen to Chris Parker's Bahamas weather broadcasts for sailors in 2012 when we were in the Bahamas. But it has been a while since I used that radio and I wanted to start practicing and thinking about what our shortwave-needs were likely to be over the coming year. 

After talking with my friend Tom Budka* I decided to try running a wire up the mast to connect to the radio. The radio came with a wire that, six years ago, I used to string up on a flag halyard each evening so I would be ready at 6:30am to hear the Bahamas forecast. Reception was generally somewhere between "staticky as can be" to "actually that's very good," but at all times the system was the essence of jury-rigged.

In an attempt to improve quality of the reception and ease of daily set-up, last week I ran a wire from the second spreader, with enough slack to run down the mast, under the cabin sole, and into the portside cabinet in the v-berth (that's where the radio listening happens in the morning). When the mast was stepped on Monday I pulled the end of the antenna wire through the secret spaces of Cupcake using a cleverly and previously installed messenger string.

Tomorrow I will get aboard to try out the reception.

What I'm particularly interested in trying is receiving weather faxes.  (My instinct is to type "weatherfaxes" as all one word. The autocorrect doesn't seem to think that's the correct way, and I'm not going to spend the next 12 months fighting that grammar battle. Plus, I'm probably wrong anyway.)

So tonight I tested a couple of applications for receiving and displaying weather fax images on the iBook. After a bit of previewing, I ended up purchasing the alluringly-named HFFAX for $8.99. The program (itself as bare-bones as a weather fax) listens through whatever input source I specify (headphone jack in my case) and if I feed it weather fax sounds from the shortwave receiver, it will generate a greyscale image of the raw weather data broadcast by NOAA (transmitted at specific times on specific frequencies for specific areas of the world).

I ran a test using as input some prerecorded weather fax audio I found on youtube. Although not coming from the radio, this input let me test the system and experiment with settings. The results are astounding to me. I know the sound I used was super clean, nothing like the shortwave I anticipate receiving, but the fact that the whistles of a fax machine played over the radio can be turned into an image with crucial weather information when we are not connected to the rest of the world by internet or cell phone or even VHF seems magical.

This is what my iMac drew when it heard the dolphin squeaks from youtube.

This next image is what a shortwave-to-HFFAX looks like on the site that sells the software I bought (blackcatsystems.com). As soon as I get a weather fax image of my own, I will post it. Might be a few weeks though, so please...try to contain yourself/selves.

*Tom and I met in third grade, he holds a PhD in electrical engineering, and he designs tiny antennas for a living. The last time we saw him he gave us a little device that detects radiation leaking from microwave ovens. Sells them for $20 each to the tinfoil-hat types.