On Weather, and radios

One of a sailboat skipper's most important jobs is to keep an eye on the weather. Even on small lake like Lake Harriet, summer storms can appear and put a small boat in peril. Even if your boat is capable of handling the rain and high winds, nobody wants to get caught in a electrical storm (or worse a tornado) if it can be avoided. This fact is one of the reasons I have a link to current and hour-by-hour forecasts for the lake on this site. But what about fast breaking storms? Is there a way we can be warned of them? In a word, yes. The US National Weather Service weather broadcast (NWR) contains codes that can alert special weather radios in a specific area about approaching bad weather. Called SANE, these codes are entered into your radio to mark its general location. For Hennepin County the SANE code is 027053. Turn your weather radio to station WX1, and you are set to go. The radio sits silent unless there is approaching bad weather, and then you get an alarm followed by an voice alert. Note that not all weather radios support SANE, and if you use one that does not, you get get the alerts for the entire state of Minnesota and western Wisconsin. On any given summer day, the older radios were constantly going off with alerts. It's also a good idea to turn it on and listen to the up-to-the-minute forecast as you rig for sailing. The radio shown in this posting can be found on Amazon HERE.

Some VHF boat radios also support NWR broadcasts, and that raises another issue. Lake Harriet is a small lake, and is completely covered by all of the major cellular operators. Therefore, there is little or no need to use VHF radios for communication. However, the US Coast Guard states that if you have one on your boat, you MUST ALWAYS have your VHF radio on and monitoring Channel 16 when in the boat. Because of the extra battery draw, I'm not sure many (if any) of the boats on the lake with radios do this, myself included. Hmmm. 

Comments

  1. Dave MackmillerFebruary 4, 2010 at 9:51 AM

    I like to keep my gadget count to a minumum, especially stuff I don't want to keep on the boat. I see there's an iPhone app called Wunder Radio that is highly rated, pulls in NOAA weather as well as streaming radio from around the world. Myabe I'll give it a shot this summer. Odd, it's $7, which just seems like a boatload of money for an iPhone app, but it's really just the cost of a cheap martini.

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  2. clayFebruary 4, 2010 at 2:07 PM

    Dave you and I are polar opposites when it comes to gadget-count. Load me up! I'm looking to link my GPS to my Autotiller to my VHF radio this spring. Clearly a necessity for lake Harriet!

    The Wunder Radio looks like a neat app. I wonder when Apple will let applications like this run in the background?

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