Position tracking

I've sorted out the issues with the sat phone sending tracking reports, well in essence discovered that the phone has stopped sending tracking reports except when it's just been turned on.  So I'll have to manually turn the phone off and on again when I want to send a position report.

So I've set up my mail server to receive and distribute these position reports to a few different sources -- the basic Iridium format which gets posted to this blog, along with links to the YOTREPS tracker and the MarineTraffic position report.

It's possible to get MarineTraffic to do tracking as well, but it costs money.  YOTREPS does tracking but it only tracks to the nearest minute (1 nautical mile) -- so (like subatomic particles) you can either know where I am or where I've been but not both.

So there will be regular updates to this blog, each one will contain a link to the current position (which should be accurate), a link to the (only roughly accurate) YOTREPS tracker, and a link to MarineTraffic (which should also be accurate).  MarineTraffic will also track my position even if the satellite phone is switched off as long as I am in range of an AIS receiver connected to the internet (coastal waters, basically).

The YOTREPS and MarineTraffic links stay the same each time, they are:

http://www.pangolin.co.nz/xtras/yotreps/tracker.php?ident=CHIARAST

http://marinetraffic.com/ais/default.aspx?zoom=10&mmsi=503518300

Tomorrow we're going out sailing, just across Lyttelton Harbour and back and I will test this out by resetting the sat phone a few times.  I've sent out a few test position reports and it seems to be OK so far but I will see how it goes out on the water.

I've also set this blog up to receive updates which I can send via sat phone, but they won't propagate to facebook and Google+ which will only happen if I post via the web interface.

So if you want to see all of that, and if you have a google email account or a yahoo account, please subscribe to this blog (which you can do with any google or yahoo email account).