Here's a 1997 story about BTX in The Express on Sunday [with errors corrected].
YACHTSMEN TAKE MOBILE COMPUTING TO NEW HORIZONS
It is becoming conventional wisdom that apart from educational and business use, the Internet and its World Wide Web is good for nothing but aimless ‘surfing’ and information that is only free because it’s worthless anyway.
But after a crew demonstrating laptop computers and mobile phones came aboard his 32' ketch Kingfisher of Hoyle recently, Cheshire and Liverpool-based skipper Cedric Flood was soon convinced that the Internet offered unique benefits for yachtsmen.
On any other day, setting out across the sand banks of the Dee Estuary and heading for the Irish Sea, some questions about waiting sea conditions would be left unanswered.
This time, Cedric dialled up the Internet on a pocket phone from the foredeck and downloaded to his laptop computer the information all mariners would really like to know in advance.
How high are the waves out there?
In four minutes all-told, he got the answer, posted by a university Web site in Tallahassee, Florida.
According to data from US Navy Intelligence opened to American yachtsmen since the end of the Cold War. Irish Sea waves, measured 34 minutes earlier at a weather buoy in Morecambe Bay, were running 3.7 metres high and coming into the bay every 14 seconds.
That could be stay-at-home weather, said Cedric, a retired British Airways pilot from Upton on the Wirral, well known for his intrepid, precisely-planned cruises from the Dee Estuary.
The laptop delivered an hourly history of two days of changing weather in Morecambe Bay: wind strength and direction, water temperature, dew point: gripping stuff for serving naval officers and retired airline pilots.
The yachtsmen and computer people packed aboard Kingfisher of Hoyle for the demonstrations agreed they had just watched a first in European yachting.
The Internet links to the US navy data had been tracked down only weeks earlier by Rod Fielding, a British Web site designer in Manchester, setting up a mariners’ Internet site known as BTX - The Boat Exchange. [http://www.btx.co.uk]
Rod moved to work on the World Wide Web when job prospects thinned out in traditional print and publishing. Vectorised world-wide charts being demonstrated on another computer in Cedric’s wheel house were engineered by Russian programmers in St Petersburg whose own traditional employment disappeared with the end of the Cold War.
The US Navy coverage of weather buoys is nearly world-wide, said Rod.
There’s one on the Channel Light Vessel and twenty others in British waters. When I first found them, I knew right away how helpful they’d be to UK yachtsmen. They were just out there waiting to be used. I worked out direct links for each one and put them on a map of the UK. Point and click on the exact location you might be heading for and it will bring up a full report of current sea conditions from any of the buoys in about ten seconds.
Of course, there are fewer buoys and stations reporting as you look further away from land - you wouldn’t expect them in the middle of the Atlantic. That’s why I worked up another page on BTX with access to weather satellite photographs. These really do cover the globe as well as British and European waters.
All the same, I want BTX to provide the kind of on-the-spot details we get from British waters for more remote areas and mid-ocean locations as well. In places, this will mean getting reports from ships in passage. I’m working on it now.
To show that information from any corner of the globe could be accessed just as quickly as the UK data, Francis Cole-Davies, 23, a support engineer from the Bristol firm, Kerridge Computer, opened one of their Twinhead laptops, plugged in a standard Nokia pocket phone and GSM modem card, and called up another weather report from BTX, this time using an American weather buoy in the Bering Strait off the coast of Siberia.
It was much colder in the Bering Strait, but according to BTX the sailing was better than in Morecambe Bay.
If weather reports kept a boat in port, Rod Fielding pointed out that a stormbound yachtsman far from home could now turn in below and use the mariners’ Web site to read the current edition of his local newspaper, like the skipper's Winsford and Middlewich Guardian, or a yachting magazine... or a any of hundreds of other British and European titles on the BTX menu.
I hope yachtsmen will use BTX for its weather information and look around the rest of the site. For example, there’s a free bulletin board to post details of boats that need moving. The first person to use it was a Californian. BTX put him in touch with American transporters who moved his boat across the country. All the services are free, you don’t pay me anything. But it showcases my work and it lets anybody who’d like to be supplying information or doing business on the Internet get in touch with me if they need help getting online.
Cedric Flood told Rod Fielding: I’ve been really impressed. You hear a lot about the mountains of information on the Internet, but - after today - I’d say that BTX alone would justify getting hooked up. It tells any yachtsman what he most needs to know before setting out, and yet it’s data one simply can’t get anywhere else.
‘Access afloat’ was successfully demonstrated on four computers taken aboard Kingfisher and the crew of visitors were each able to link the PCs to the Internet - and BTX - with a variety of mobile phones.
It’s worked well on all the different equipment, including mine added Cedric.
Marta Judge, from Pace Consumer Electronics Ltd, in Shipley, West Yorks explained, You can now get all that there is on the World Wide Web when you’re on board a family yacht, using equipment that is no more complicated or expensive than the kit you might see business people using on the train.
To help keep portable kit in the wheel house down to a minimum, Pace, Britain’s biggest modem manufacturers, recommended their brand new credit-card-sized PMC Smart Card that can link most mobile phones and laptops to any one of the European GSM mobile phone networks.
Later, at Cedric’s berth in the Liverpool Harbourside Marina, one of the electronics experts asked if Kingfisher of Hoyle could actually have been sailed as far as the Bering Strait.
You could do it if you had this, said Chris Baker, Managing Director of the Surrey firm Softwave, producing a single CD-ROM disc, that would slip into the Kerridge Twinhead laptop or Chris’s own 'SeaPC', a waterproof desktop computer designed specifically for onboard use.
That one CD disc held a full world set of 3,150 electronic charts, digitised from mostly British Admiralty charts and continually updated by the famous Transas programmers of St Petersburg.
Chris explained, It took 250,000 man hours of programming in St Petersburg. The charts are at the heart of the NAVI-Sailor system, run from Southampton by the largest electronic chart developer in the world.
Electronic charts are used for world-wide navigation by big ships, but they will run a navigation system on a yachtsman’s laptop computer.
If he interfaces his laptop with the little global positioning system that so many yachtsmen now use, he gets a comprehensive real-time navigation system on board.
There’s a boat marker that continually shows your true position on the chart and it automatically lays a track to show where you’re going and where you’ve been, just as you’d do yourself using a traditional paper chart.
The charts move around for you, explained Cedric Flood.
Your computer pulls up the new charts as it tracks your movements. I’ve never known anything quite so reassuring on a night passage, as that computer screen.
Chris Baker recalled the day he demonstrated NAVI-Sailor to Her Majesty’s Customs: When I showed them how the system keeps an accurate history of all the movements of the vessel, they were tremendously impressed.
But when I told them that I reckon one of our laptops could now sail a completely unmanned yacht, loaded with contraband, across the North Sea and into a mud berth on the Essex coast, they were absolutely horrified.
CONTACTS:
BTX: http://www.btx.co.uk
Kerridge: http://www.kerridge.com
Twinhead: http://www.twinhead.com
Pace: mjudge@pacecom.co.uk
Softwave: softwave1@AOL.com ( Click to send mail )
Rod Fielding: (WebWorks) wrx@zen.co.uk ( Click to send mail )
ends
To return to our index page, click here.
