Regular readers may recall my feature on Realtime float plan updating with Twitter. My Facebook friends are certainly aware of it; they’ve grown accustomed to my cryptic status updates, which generally follow this form: “Two Lucky Fish underway Friday Harbor to Anacortes. 2 POB.”
This summer, I’m hoping to spend a good deal more time “off-grid”, in terms of cellular coverage. This presents a problem.
To back up a bit, I’ve been really happy using Twitter as a kind of "real-time float plan" manager. It lets my friends and family know where I am, how many POB (persons on board), where I intend to go, and what sort of conditions I’m encountering. There are two problems:
- I haven’t found a location-aware Twitter client for Windows that will work with plain old NMEA (serial port) GPS data coming into my laptop from my Shine Micro Class B AIS unit. The upshot: I can’t feed my location data directly into Twitter, which is just kinda stupid.
- if I’m out of cell coverage, I can’t tweet at all. And on my 22-foot C-Dory, I’m not about to install expensive pay-by-the-character satellite communication gear.
So my current thinking is that the new SPOT 2 (with two "I’m OK" messages, one configured to "Two Lucky Fish is underway" and the other set to "Two Lucky Fish is secure") would solve both problems:
- Even when I’ve got cellular coverage, the SPOT-generated tweet offers the location-aware functionality I want, hopefully with a TinyURL Google map link or something included in my Tweet/Facebook update. Then I can augment the SPOT-generated "Vessel underway" tweet with unique text such as "Enroute Deception Pass, ETA 1430, 2 POB.”
- And when I’ve got no cellular coverage, my online presence degrades somewhat gracefully (Thanks to Steve Roberts for suggesting the phrase “graceful degradation”), retaining the "vessel underway" and "vessel secure" location-tagged tweets. I can always provide folks with more details once I’ve got Wifi or cell coverage ashore.
That’s the plan, and it seems like it’s all within reach, this season.
More later, as I figure out the details…
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