The Weather Info Box NAVTEX Wonder

As you know by now, the combination of weather and radio is irresistible to me. Next to any number of daily weather forecasts and the Shipping Forecast on BBC 4 Long Wave/ Internet Radio, I  usually keep a close eye on maritime weather forecasts, such as Weatherfax, RTTY and NAVTEX. The latter can be received by any number of software decoders, such as Yand or Zorns Lemma. However, a lot of the time, you will want to take the weather with you, as it were, especially if you do have a boat, or otherwise want to be mobile in your marine weather watching, for example on holiday. For this kind of monitoring, I use the nifty Mörer Weather Infobox (WIB2D), which is a small, stand-alone NAVTEX decoder for 490 and 518kHz transmissions. It has an internal aerial and a charge lasts for around 3 days at sea (or land). It sorts messages automatically and has a barometric pressure display too. The display is small but very clear, and it is just fun to scroll through the messages at the end of the day. There will be more than you think, and, leaving this on overnight may yield some surprising NAVTEX DX too, from Holland, Germany or Scandinavia. Very handy, yacht or not.

www.moerer.de

www.wetterinfobox.com

Georg Wiessala

20 May 2020