Great Lakes Marine/Maritime Mobile Net Offers Communication to Land

Published: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 7:00 am
By: Great Lakes Marine Mobile Net

The Great Lakes Marine Mobile Net was established to provide mariners on the Great Lakes with a resource of casual communications to land. Our objectives are to promote safe boating on the Great Lakes and connecting rivers, and to promote the use of Ham Radio on board.

During recent offshore and cross lake sailing races, it was confirmed that not even VHF or boosted 3G could span the communications distance to land from offshore of these Great Lakes. Some remote coves are also out of VHF and cell phone range.

Our free and voluntary HF service will close the gap for those mariners with a Ham Radio license. These services include weather information, marina information, position reporting, float plans, phone patches, email messaging, medical services and emergency response.

As well as a growing network of analog (voice) stations, there are a number of digital stations situated around the shores of the Great Lakes. SSB stations have experienced operators with reliable resources at their fingertips. Digital stations supply Pactor and Winmor HF access to the internet, as well as VHF Packet internet gateways to vessels in range.

Where Net Control Stations are located adjacent to busy ports or waterways, we monitor 2M repeaters for local voice communications. We also have Skype for worldwide HF phone patches and Echolink (KC9SGV, node# 516288) for full coverage 2M communication.

Operating Schedule & Frequencies:

08:30 ET and 19:30 ET (13:30 UTC and 00:30 UTC) 3.932/3.927 Mhz +/- QRM first,
and then 7.261/7.268 Mhz LSB +/- QRM approximately 15 minutes later.
On weekends, an extra session of the net is on 7.261/7.268 LSB +/- QRM at 1100 ET (1600 UTC).

For more information about Great Lakes Marine Mobile, visit http://www.sailblogs.com/member/glmmnet