XAXERO Weather Fax on the BT Challenge Yachts in Sydney.

The BT Global Challenge is the world's toughest yacht race. 14 Specially designed 60+
foot steel yachts compete against each other racing to windward in the roaring forties and
completing a circumnavigation in 8 months. Crew pay upwards of 20,000 pounds each to
take part while the captain is a paid professional.

The BT race arrived in Sydney Australia on the 17th February 1997 in Sydney for a
layover before the gruelling leg from Sydney to Cape Town. A hard beat to the Cape of
Good Hope. Here the wind over current can raise phenomenal 30 metre vertically crested
waves.

This year, all the yachts are fitted with Xaxero Weather Fax For Windows.

Each yacht has 2 Toshiba notebook DX 75 computers. One is dedicated to Inmarsat C
and the other for onboard applications including weather fax, NavMaster (charting
software), and Microsoft Works. The computers are located away from the chart table
and so do not lend themselves to optimal electronic charting. As a result, they are used
extensively for weather fax. The Xaxero software is the most used software on the boats.

In all except one boat - Time and Tide, the weather fax was used extensively. Figures
from 5 to 20 usable faxes were recorded per day on the various boats. Several one on one
sessions were held with the skipper and crew to evaluate the problems and find solutions.
The main problem we found was that the carrier frequency was being selected rather than
the upper sideband. 

The current software versions that are running are almost a year old. As all the yachts had
been fitted with an early version of version 3 of the 16 bit product, we felt it prudent to
strongly advise upgrading to version  3.1 where some serious memory allocation
problems had been fixed. This was carried out with a minimum of fuss.

The skipper of Group 4 the current race leader, said that The Weather Fax was vital to
tactical planning and critical use of the data was instrumental in moving from thirteenth
to second place. Being more of a sailor than a computer user he appreciated the graphical
user interface that Windows provides over the DOS substitutes.

All Xaxero demodulators were working. No hardware faults were reported. This is
consistent with the current series. 1720 shipped to date and none have failed so far. We
are particularly proud of this figure considering the complexity of the decoding hardware.


Several design modifications were proposed and we are implementing them in the 4.5
edition for Windows 95/NT due out on CD ROM in early June.

In summary looking at the future of computing in offshore conditions and evaluating
current use of computers. I would see the importance of computers on a really serious
offshore voyage facilitating Communications and weather information solicitation. One
computer was a communications terminal and the other an intelligent weather fax
machine. 


Jonathan Selby

Xaxero Software