SailMail vs Kiel Radio

There are a number of radio-based email services about but Kiel Radio and SailMail seem to be the two most used by yachties who are not also radio hams. I have used them both, and this is how I found they compared: Neither system offers internet access and both systems offer some additional data such as weather, but I have just concentrated here on the email side.

Overview

Both systems rely on special modems to communicate via a short wave radio, and the most commonly used is the Pactor. Both use their own firmware (which can be downloaded to the Pactor) but after that they differ. Kiel works with Microsoft Outlook, so once the modem is installed it is just like using Outlook. SailMail uses AirMail software, originally developed for radio hams. There are no initial software costs, just an annual subscription fee - $250 for SailMail at the time of writing (2/04) and a little more for Kiel Radio.

Installation

Kiel Radio supply (or you can download) an installation CD. However when I signed up in 2003 they still did not have an installer for XP. It is not particularly difficult as it is just a question of installing the modem correctly, but it is quite painstaking. After a while Kiel sent me some German instructions which helped, but the whole thing was more tedious than it needed to be, largely because my account was set up incorrectly on their server.

SailMail uses dedicated software, Airmail,  which can be downloaded from the internet and fits on a couple of floppies. It installs under all recent versions of Windows. There is an excellent and detailed Primer which can also be downloaded, so installation is very straightforward.

Coverage

Kiel Radio is based in Germany. They offer half a dozen frequencies from the 2mhz to 18mhz band, so cover the whole of Europe. We found we could connect all over the Med and until about three quarters of the way across the Atlantic. Kiel have ‘roaming partners’ around the world to provide near global coverage. However we had some trouble getting the frequencies and special passwords out of Kiel who advised us that their US partner was having difficulties and wished us good luck. So after several failed attempts to connect in the US we gave up, which led to us switching to SailMail. There are also slightly different procedures for connecting to partners.

SailMail is US based, so strong there. They have several stations in the US, one in Belgium and various others around the world which should provide near-global coverage. And because they are all SailMail stations (not ‘partners’) they work in the same way which makes roaming seamless. In the Mediterranean however SailMail's single station may mean it is harder to get a connection.

Restrictions

Only one exchange can successfully take place on any given frequency, so with radio email there are inevitably problems of congestion. And it is slower than a conventional modem over land lines. Remember also that neither operator charges on a per-byte basis (there are commercial suppliers who do that) so both put restrictions on usage.

Kiel Radio  restricts use to ten minutes a day. In reality it does not have any mechanism for policing this, but they keep logs (which you can access yourself) to see how much time people are using and can come after you or cut you off if you exceed the usage. They now have an html stripper so if you people send you html emails (which should be strongly discouraged) they can strip them down to plain text. They also don’t like auto-forwarded emails. We only found this out when we didn’t’ get any emails for two weeks and THEN they told us they were binning all our emails. Kiel permits attachments up to 100k (far bigger than I think practical). With Kiel Radio you are supposed to be able to collect email from other accounts, but I rarely found this worked and quickly stopped trying.

SailMail explicitly asks you not to have emails forwarded to your account and strongly advises you to be restrictive in who you give your SailMail address to. They also operate a twelve-minutes-a-day rule, but in their case it is enforced and if you exceed 90 minutes in a week you will be advised and then cut off. So you know where you are! SailMail does not permit attachments.

Software

Kiel Radio, as discussed before, works with Microsoft Outlook. To be more precise, because it uses a standard internet dialler, it should work with any email program that uses POP3/SMTP – the email client just thinks it is working with an ordinary modem.  If you get a lot of emails and are on and off the boat a lot, then this is obviously a big advantage as it means that if you are a regular Outlook user all your emails can be  in one place, and was the main reason I initially chose Kiel Radio.

Kiel recommend you also use an addition piece of freeware - Magic Mail. Magic Mail is a lovely little tool if you have several POP3 email accounts, as you can set it up to poll each of them at regular intervals and it just picks up the headers so you can delete junk before you download it. Clearly this is of potential benefit to anyone with a slow connection, such as a radio user. However given that our junk email quotient to our Kiel Radio address was very low I did not find it useful as it would take almost as long to poll the account as to download the emails in the first place, so you inevitably ended up taking a lot longer overall.

AirMail, the program used by SailMail, is a pretty straightforward mail client with all main features you’d expect, an address book, inboxes, outboxes etc.  

AirMail includes a dumb terminal program, which is useful for setting up and checking your modem, and also has the ability to remotely control the radio. This is a fantastically useful feature because SailMail has around 50 frequencies which are a pain to program in to your radio. If you have a Pactor II modem you’ll need another wire and another Com port (or good USB-to-Com adaptor) but I believe the Pactor III modem can be configured using the main radio-modem cable. With remote tuning it is a breeze to check and move between different frequencies right from your computer.

AirMail can also be configured as a POP3/SMTP client. So if like me you sometimes can dial up through a mobile, you can use AirMail to get and send email not just to your SailMail account, but any unrestricted POP3/SMTP server (including attachments). In fact AirMail is quite clever like this and when writing mail you can specify it to send the mail through a particular account (much harder in Outlook) or any of several, in which case it will use the one you first connect to. This makes AirMail very flexible as a tool for managing all your email if you are not locked into Outlook (though it lacks Outlook's contact and diary management features). AirMail can also be set up to download (with a land-based connection) all your emails from any number of accounts with a single click.

Propagation Prediction

Kiel Radio provides propagation prediction embedded in its ssb based web site. This includes sun spot activity, but I found it frequently out of date.

You can download free propagation prediction software from ITSHF. I found this completely impenetrable.

However the good news is that if you install the ITSHF software on your computer (links in the SailMail site) then Airmail automatically identifies it and activates an inbuilt tool within Airmail. This enables you to launch a Propagation window from the terminal program which then lists all the Airmail stations in order of proximity, once you give it your co-ordinates. Clicking on each station then produces a mini-spreadsheet, usefully coloured, which gives you the percentage chance of a good connection for each frequency offered by that station over a 24 hour period. This does not take into account sunspots (though you can enter that data in from somewhere) but it makes a very useful and effective tool. Here's a screen shot of what you get, showing the predictions for connecting with Rock Hill, South Carolina from the Southern Caribbean at 1900UT - your only real chance is on 18mhz, at 96 percent.

Ease of connection

When you connect to an ISP via a landline all you need to worry about is whether they have any lines free, and nowadays that is not normally a problem.

With radio email you have that same worry, and it can be a problem since the available frequencies are limited with both SailMail and Kiel Radio. You also have to worry about propagation and whether  you are in the right place to connect to particular stations at a particular frequencies, sun spots etc. 

With either you have to be careful to check that the frequency you intend to call on is clear otherwise you’ll just ruin someone’s existing hookup.

Kiel Radio has limited numbers of frequencies. When you tune in to one of their frequencies a chirping sound indicates it is ready for business. Also one of the Pactor LEDs will glow green. That way you know it is free and the quality of the chirp gives you an idea of how good the connection will be.

SailMail is harder work. You have many more stations and frequencies to choose from, so if you are in the Americas the chances are you can find a free station when you want. But you only know it is free because you hear nothing – there’s no comforting chirp, so you have to listen carefully for traffic to be sure whether the frequency is good and clear. A further complication is that most SailMail stations have only one transceiver even though they have several frequencies. This is like having one operator to answer half a dozen phone lines – when the transceiver is busy on a call any calls on other frequencies go unanswered. SailMail advise that you should check all the frequencies first to see if the station is busy, but of course if you are within a few hundred miles of a station the skip will stop you picking up anything on say 18mhz. It is also hard work to check all the frequencies, though if your radio is capable of being remotely controlled it is a lot easier.

Speed

It is very hard to make judgements about which system is quicker. They are both using the same physical technologies, so the only differences can lie in the software.

Because SailMail offers more frequencies, you theoretically have more chance of getting a good connection if you are in the Americas. If you are in Europe you are stuck with the Belgium transmitter so you are in much the same position as with Kiel.

Empirically, I have found SailMail to be less frustrating on the speed front than Kiel.

With Kiel Radio on some days you can hook up and the emails whizz back and forth very promptly. More often what happens is that you have say a 2k email to send. You activate the Microsoft dialler dialog so you can see how many bytes are being sent and received and after a couple of minutes you will have sent 4k bytes and received say 2k. Nothing then happens for some minutes after which it will suddenly either complete the email or hang. This is immensely frustrating because you are trying to manage your emails within 10 minutes a day, so if you are sending a big email and its taken 5 minutes to pump the data up, and then sits around, what do you do? Cut your losses and disconnect and start again (minimum of another 5 minutes) or wait and hope for the best? I found myself just waiting as I soon learnt that even after 5 minutes wait at this stage the email might go through. I am told this is for technical reasons to do with the way Kiel manages emails, but I don’t know for sure.

AirMail gives you much better feedback on what is going on, and seems to spend far less time handshaking at the beginning and end of each email. My impression is that in practice it is faster, but I cannot say for sure. With AirMail you can see if you have a slow connection as it tells you the speed at which it is exchanging data. So if it's a slow one you can quit and try another frequency or time. Airmail also tells you (when you figure out the log) how many messages you have to be downloaded, and the total bytes, so you can decide whether to pull the plug on a poor connection. AirMail is certainly less frustrating than Kiel – though sending emails by radio is frequently frustrating to some degree if you have been used to good landline connections. I keep a log of all my AirMail connections. It is something to do while waiting for the data to chug through but is also useful to keep track of which stations are good at what times, and avoids false impressions of it having been faster or slower in the past. Here are the key stats for the first few months of use:

* 165 successful sessions.
* On average 2.5 failed connection attempts per successful session. (In practice about half the time you get through straight away; some days the atmospherics are bad or the waves are busy and you can try a dozen times).
* Sent and received 423 emails taking 473 minutes, so an average session time of under 3 minutes.
* On average 1,600 characters sent/received per minute (ranges from a low of 0 to a high of 7,500). I use a Pactor II modem firmware upgraded to Pactor III, which provides significant speed benefits over the II.

It may be that my SSB is not sufficiently well shielded, but for whatever reason I find it makes quite a difference to the speed if I disconnect my laptop's 12v power supply from ship's power. Our Autopilot can also create interference too (even if it is just on and idle) and turning it off can speed things up.

Webmail

So, what happens if you leave the boat? What happens if you are in a busy port where, as is often the case, reception is poor?

Kiel Radio does not provide a webmail client. It does however allow you to set up forwarding so all your Kiel email goes on to another account. You can do this either via the radio or via the internet. The only snag is that if you have had a few duff days trying to get your emails and then make harbour and slope off to a café to set up forwarding, you won’t be able to get the emails that are already in your inbox. The forwarding only works on emails as they come in.

AirMail has a webmail client you can access from the internet, so you have simultaneous dual access. In fact you are very much encouraged to do so rather than use the radio when you can. This makes life a lot easier. And AirMail also has excellent POP3 access as discussed earlier.

Weather and other data

Kiel Radio has some support for weather data on its site, but I never found this very easy to access, or very useful.

AirMail has a feature called SailDocs which enables pretty sophisticated weather reports, both text and image files. SailDocs is an automated document server. You send it emails with specially formatted and coded text, and it emails back to you the data requested.

For text weather reports you first send an email to saildocs.com asking for an index of available weather areas. Once you pick the one you want you then send a further email. For example the text "sub FZNT23.KNHC" will instruct the SailDocs server to send you the NOAA text weather report for the Caribbean sea area every day for 14 days. The size of these varies according to the amount of text written by the forecasters, but is usually 3,000-5,000 bytes.

Wind map files are available as 'gribs'. You can select the area you want using an inbuilt tool in AirMail - you just draw a rectangle on a map, specify how many days you want it for and the time of day at which you want it retrieved and an email is automatically generated. Gribs can be specified with 24, 48 and 72 hour projections.

Here is a typical grib showing wind projections for the Southern Caribbean area. (A full feather on an arrow denotes 10 knots, half a feather 5 knots, so in this example the winds range from 0 to 15 knots, mostly due East).  The ability to get data like this for any area of the world at any time is a powerful feature. The email with this grib (with images for 24, 48 and 72 hrs) was only 2,500 bytes.

I believe SailDocs can be used with other email programs, but its integration with AirMail does make it easy - particularly for specifying gribs. SailDocs can also be asked to retrieve any page from the web by specifying an html address. It can only retrieve the text, so this has limited usefulness given the wide use of graphics on most pages, but you could use it for checking share prices, market data, bulletin boards, news reports etc.

Support

Any discussion about customer support is bound to be subjective, so I can only relate my experiences.

Kiel Radio:  I had a lot of trouble setting up Kiel Radio and spent dozens of hours trying to figure the thing out, despite having spent twenty years installing all kinds of software into computers. I was specifically told in writing that my username was zingano@kielradio.de but when I eventually got in touch with Kiel Radio to help me they said I was using the wrong user name and it should be just Zingano. This still did not solve the problem and after some more abortive attempts I asked whether there might be a problem in that the licence file I had been instructed to download to the modem was for the ship’s call sign, 9H6337 and this was different from the user name. Yes, they said, this was the problem and it was my fault since most people choose their ship’s call sign as the user name. I never understood how this could be my fault since the just asked me to propose a user name and they issued the licence file.

At one point Kiel sent me more documentation to be helpful. But this was 8mb of pdfs including the user guide I had already been given on CD. Personally I would not dream of emailing 8mb of stuff to anyone without asking unless I knew that they had loads of bandwidth. To do this to someone known to be on a yacht is madness, and it blocked our account for some time until we could figure out what was going on and delete it.

We still had problems even with the new license file and eventually one of the Kiel staff rang up to talk me through it which was very helpful and much appreciated since their emails tended to be confusing and ambiguous.

Once we got going on some occasions all my emails would come back saying that they were not deliverable since the addressees did not exist. They were regular correspondents and when I wrote to Kiel about it (twice) I never got a reply. I just sent the rejects again and they were fine.

As I mentioned before Kiel Radio after some months took a dislike to my having emails autoforwarded to their account from my email filtering service (we get a lot of junk email), and binned them all. They took two weeks to tell me and never responded to my complaints or requests for recovery of my dumped emails.

When we tried to set up roaming it took me two attempts to get the roaming frequencies and passwords out of Kiel together with a note along the lines of “there have been problems good luck” but no further explanation of what differences there might be.

SailMail: These people seem to have a very different culture. For a start it is a membership organisation rather than commercial, so members are expected to behave according to the rules rather than act as customers. It also means that the support staff have a different approach and they could not have been more helpful. AirMail was written by Jim Corenman, who is one of the people behind SailMail, so that helps too.

The SailMail documentation is very fully written and comprehensive. We had some difficulties with the installation which were entirely to do with converting from Kiel Radio to SailMail – we needed a different license and different firmware and things did not initially work the way the Pactor people said they should. However the SailMail folk talked me through this with unfailing promptness, courtesy and accuracy. Every time we solved one problem and I wrote about the next they came back the following day with extremely precise instructions about what to do. (I think this was the first time someone had converted from Kiel to SailMail so our problems were unusual).

So which is the best?

As you will have seen, there are pros and cons. In some areas Kiel is more convenient and easier, in others SailMail. So I think this is one of those situations where there isn’t a ‘best’. You just need to think about the features that each has and see what stacks up best for your own needs.

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