Ummm ... NAVTEX is transmitted on a rotating schedule covering several
dozen "regions" world-wide from a variety of stations, all on 518 KHz.
Each station has a time slot -- 5 mins or so -- and the traffic varies
and is highly repetitive. There is some WX, but it's mainly Notice to
Mariners about various conditions and situations such as hazards,
objects falling from the sky without warning [aka military exercises],
lights and buoy's out of service, and the like.
With the new synthesizer, I can copy NAVTEX [or at least could, haven't
tried since we moved to N. NV] very well on my K3. If I recall right,
connect the antenna to the auxiliary RX ANT jack. There are a number
of decoders, I use YAND [Yet Another NAVTEX Decoder] which is free and
findable using the usual methods.
The transmission is SITOR-B, using the CCIR-476 character code and I
think is unreadable using a normal 5-unit RTTY decoder, although I've
never tried it. I think AMTOR FEC mode will decode it, although I've
never tried that either.
Any vessel sailing in the open ocean should have NAVTEX receive, but for
general weather, it is probably not adequate. The WEFAX transmissions
include visible and IR satellite photography, what appear to be
hand-drawn forecast summaries [those of the Bering Sea will have the
edge of the ice pack marked], wave height charts, schedules, and
synopses. They are way bigger than what our printers will handle, you
need to wait until it gets to the area you're interested in before
starting to save the image to a file for printing.
On 4/11/2016 5:07 AM, a45wg wrote:
Clint, Your brother will find it easier to revise the 518 Khz NavText
messages - which are transmitted every 6 hours (if memory serves me
correct). They are a simply RTTY format. I tried for long time to get
HF WeFAX to work - but the number of stations transmitting it are
extremely few and far between. They are more local +/- 1500 kms (more
than enough for coastal use). There are some small black boxes
available which do this - for < $200 - which may be worth looking
at.
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