Dave Kruger wrote: > Your experience is similar to mine. snip... > However, the distances you quote are from you to/from a whip on a larger > vessel, yes? (Not from yak to yak.) I suspect you might not > always get good > transmissions from yak to yak at 3 miles if each radio is just 2 > feet off the > water. For comparison, I have made beach-to-beach contacts using > 3W and 5W > handheld VHF's at 5.5 miles and 8 miles, but each of us was > several feet above > the water. When you are in your yak, sitting on the water, and so is the > person receiving your signal, I wonder what the practical range is. > Dave, Most of the time my companions are in easy visual range. And unfortunately, not enough of them carry radios yet. You are right, the contacts I was referring to were to larger boats with an antenna considerably higher than the 2 ft height of mine. I would expect yak to yak is probably 1 - 1 1/2 mi maximum no matter what power setting is used The reason for the purchase of the radio was primarily to be able to call the CG in an emergency and also to warn other boats/ships of my presence when they are apparently trying to run me down no matter what type of evasive action I take. A funny situation came up just before Christmas. There were about 3 private fishing boats heading toward us and one private boat that was all over the ocean at high speed. He would head towards us and then turn 90 degrees and then come back towards us and it appeared that he did not see us at all. I placed a quick call on Ch 16 that there were 2 kayaks 1/8 mi dead ahead and everybody slowed down. As we all passed, there were some friendly waves and we didn't have any wakes to bother us. Steve (Kayak Vessel Foggy Day) *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:33:09 PDT