SV MYJOY sails with PACTOR in the Arctic

MYJOY below the Oresund bridge

The 17 meter long, steel two-master MYJOY doesn't sail around the world along the Barefoot route like so many other PACTOR users, but rather in the cold North. Her path will take her to the North Sea along the Asian Arctic coast, through the Bering Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

From the  22nd of June 2007 on the SY MYJOY will cover around 6000 kilometers. It is a demanding project, which follows a historic trail:

Historic picture of the Vega Tromsø

Willem Barents (1555-1597), a Dutch sailor, made three journeys in attempt to discover the North passage to Asia. However his goal was reached only in July of 1878 by the Swedish researcher Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832-1901), who sailed Northeast in the direction of the North Polar Sea in his Norwegian boat Vega Tromso. His ship was stuck in the ice of the Bering strait from September of 1878 until June of 1879, and finally on 22nd of July Alaska appeared on the horizon.

The north-east passage to China and the Pacific ocean

MYJOY was especially equipped for the trip to the rough northern latitudes and is already undertaking her first test voyages to Greenland and Ireland. Recently the communication system was completed by a PTC-IIpro. Two Radioamateurs are on board and will update the adventures of MYJOY on their website via PACTOR.

Kapitän Rickard der MYJOY

We are, of course, first of all interested in how the SCS hardware behaves in the cold temperatures and extreme environmental conditions. Will the written and graphic data in such remote regions transfer just as easily as in the sunny areas of our planet?  Question after question, for whose answers we will have to wait for more than one Nordic winter.

Maat Eric, am Bordrechner der MYJOY

First the PACTOR connection was meant to be established via the WINLINK system, however photos and text quickly exceeded the daily timeframe of 30 minutes, that WINLINK allows for its users. Thus the team decided to transfer the data by direct mailbox contact, which is also possible with Jim Corenman's Freesoft AIRMAIL. The Host station SM5HF, Björn, is automatically scanning a range of frequencies between 80 and 6 meters in the HAM bands. In this way MYJOY can connect to the host anytime according to local propagation to send and receive any kind of data. Both stations, ashore and on sea, use the ICOM 706MKIIG with 100 Watt PEP output. MYJOY put up the typical backstay antenna, while the base station operates with a HyGain AV-640. During the previous trips to the northerly latitudes the 40 meter band showed to be the most used frequency.

MYJOY in Reykjavik / Island

If you would like to follow this journey, quickly save the internet address in your Favorites: www.myjoy.tv

From Michael Wnuk, KD7SVU, September 2005, Island Koh Phuket, Thailand