We are talking large sailboats going off shore and staying in places with little to no spare supplies. This all started with a friend that is in the Caribbean and has had both of his radios fail and can't even make it to talk to the marina's and bridges. Turns out that one of the radio problems is somewhere in his coax and so he has to replace the cable. Something that you don't want to have to replace that often. He does have HF but that doesn't do any good for bridges and most of the Coast Guard traffic is on VHF.
I am very interested in this not only to help a friend, but within the next few months I need to replace my coax and antenna. I would like to be able to run my 2 meter off of the same setup but unless I can find a really wide band antenna I don't see that happening. Maybe I would be better trying to run UHF and Marine VHF off of 2 antennas with a diplexer at the top of the mast. But that is a whole different discussion. One thing I am going to suggest to these guys is that anyone who doesn't have a spare antenna should at least make a ladder line J-Pole cut to the marine bands to be able to hoist it up the mast in an emergency. Vern KI4ONW "But how far can you get on the less than 9 watts you will have left after using a cable with that much loss?" Pretty darn far! In the "old" days, I used to mess with the old "packset" (pre handheld) radios that were available at the time. I had one GE, pre "PortaMobil" that was rated at 250 milliwatta output on 150Mc that I converted to 2M. I used to talk consistently and reliably from my home on the SF Peninsula to a station in Sacramento, about 98 miles away. The packset was connected to my base antenna but that had about 80 feet of RG8 from my shop to the tower. I was high and the path had little or no obstruction but it is still not an over-water path. It doesn't take much power under those conditions. If it were me, unless I had a VERY large powerboat, I would stick with a marine handheld with both NiCd and Alkaline batteries available. Tom DGN
