In the United Kingdom , Do We Have A National Weather Service , By Radio? E.g. VHF?

Question

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes.

COASTGUARD MSI Broadcasts on VHF (Channels 10, 23, 84 and 86)

The BBC does a great service making available a wide variety of information of use to sailors, but it is not always easy to know what is available and when. This chart is intended to clarify the voice and transcript availability for the most useful of the BBC sources. All voice services are carried on Radio 4.

LW (Long Wave or 198kHz) is great if you have a (increasingly rare) LW radio and are on hand to rotate the radio (the ferrite rod antenna inside the radio needs to be orientated towards the transmitter especially when swinging at a mooring) otherwise you may receive nothing. Furthermore, LW is highly susceptible to interference such as that generated by data on the yacht's NMEA data and gas alarm circuits. LW also works across Europe and is broadcast more frequently than the FM service. (Note that the LW service is also available via satellite)

FM is constrained by Line-Of-Sight restrictions as are all VHF transmission, but BBC transmitters are ubiquitous and all have reasonable transmitter power. Ideally a RDS (to provide automatic tuning) portable with some record capability is needed. Even so, FM only carries two forecasts a day on weekdays - the noon forecast is never carried.

DAB transmission is VHF and suffers from more severe line-of-sight constraints than VHF-FM but has the benefit that there are receivers available that record broadcasts. However, we have not identified a particular model to recommend.

DTT (i.e. Freeview)  and SAT (Satellite) transmit Radio 4 and are a possibility but there are no known small gimballed receiving systems. Note: Digital Television text services do not carry shipping forecasts.

WEB - On-Line reception of the transcript requires the user to be in the presence of a Wi-Fi node, which is only likely to occur where one of the previous methods is also available or to receive using GPRS (a mobile phone data link) or CSD (a mobile phone modem data link which is slower than GPRS). You will also need  mobile web capability such as Microsoft Mobile Internet Explorer because the BBC does not put marine forecasts on its WAP website.