IARMS

At  the  beginning  of  October   2000 a new Maritime Net has begun.  Working  on   20  Meters Band,  the  IARMS  provides frequently updated Weather Forecasts to Sailing Vessels and low profile Ships.The service is based on volounteer work and has no relationship with any public/private funding. 

The Net is on the air evey day on 14.297 kHz at 19:00 UTC.

Why The Amateur Radio Maritime Mobile Nets ?

Radiocommunications and Sailing Vessels

We started with the Italian Maritime Net on October of the year 2000, and we have served several vessels sailing in the Atlantic outside the Coast of Brasil, Africa and busy in Ocean Passages. We established the best hour of the day to run the Net to have the better conditions of propagation, we choosed the evening hours that permit us to reach by our radio stations a large part of the Atlantic. We usually work on SSB but sometimes we have some contacts on radiotelegraphy and in digital modes when there are vessels very far from our transmitting site (Cape Horn, Falkland Islands, Cape Town). We pick up weather informations from Official Meteorological Bureau. Our job consists to relay these informations to the vessels on the Net. We have an accurate LOG-BOOK on which we record all the details (last position, ships data and crew members) of the sailing vessels which take part on the Net.We thought for long time about the possible help that our Maritime Net could offer to sailors and we decided to serve the Area of Tropical Waters of the Atlantic expecially because of Tropical Storms that in a period of the year affect those areas. Many times small vessels are not equipped with advanced radio equipments such as satellite and they can obtain informations about the weather on High Frequencies from the Official Sources but... on board a small vessels there are usually few people or sometimes there is a solitare, in this case it is good, for the sailor, to pick up the information at scheduled time with possibility of repetition of some parts of the weather reports, lost during broadcasting trasmissions of Coast Radio Stations because of interferences, another reason of the existence of Maritime Nets is that  in the last period the number of Coast Stations operating on HF has also diminuished because the introduction of the satellite. and usually small ships and expecially sailing vessels are not equipped of satellite terminals. HF are easier to use and do not require expensive equipments.

A Coast radio operator trasmitting in Morse code weather reports and commercial traffic for vessels at sea. Morse code is officially not longer in use also if several Coast radio stations continue to use it for broadcatsing WX and navigational warnings