Richard Idiens reviews his new pocket NAVTEX.

My old NASA CRT NATEX has done stalwart service for at least two owners of Jonathan-Livingston over twenty years.  I value its input for every voyage, but I am used to it only providing a single frequency, the international English, and only receiving from one or two of the nearest transmitters.  It is getting a bit old and takes up a fair amount of real estate on my radio station table as well as the active antenna mounted on a push pit pole.  Consequently, I got tempted into buying a Moerer Weather Infobox at the Dusseldorf show.  

It’s the WIB2D model, which has it’s own little screen and runs for 3 days on batteries before needed to be recharged off a USB port or its own cigar-lighter charger.  It is smaller than a packet of cigarettes and receives both NATEX frequencies through a built in ferrite-rod antenna.  

I expected about the same radio capability as my old NAVTEX receiver.  Much to my delight, the little wonder receives messages from nearly all the NATEX stations.  For the first time, I need to consider suppressing the more distant sources, like Algiers or Reykjavik, which might not be very applicable in Brussels.  It has its own little screen, control buttons and a very intuitive menu structure, plus a built in barograph, displaying 48 hours but recording 7 days, and a thermometer.

The supplied software can display all the Infobox contents on a PC via a USB cable.  The individual messages can be saved as text files onto the computer, printed, or reloaded and read again in the same software.  The barograph data is displayed as a graph, zoom-able from 7 days to 12 hours and if desired printed or saved as a bmp file.

All in all, a neat box of tricks that will be tested in earnest this summer.