Nobody thinks twice about listening to his or her TV, but in an unusual twist on that, savvy boaters are suddenly watching their radios. Satellite radio marine weather, with its ability to present a live weather map picture at the helm, was the talk of the aisles during boat show season. This service is rapidly carving out a space for itself on display screens at the helm of any boat large enough to carry a chart plotter.

If you are still listening to NOAA weather radio for your marine weather information you are not getting the full picture. In fact you are not getting any of the picture that is currently available. With satellite weather service you can have real time data and a weather radar picture, for the nation, or just the particular part of the ocean you’ll be cruising, in real time, displayed where and when you want it, and how you want it.

As well as a straight radar weather map, the service provides a range of data, from sea-surface temperature, to storm tracking, and everything in between. The satellite weather data, is “completely user configurable, allowing boaters to view weather on a national level or zoom in to look at a specific location,” explained Bob Baron, CEO of WxWorx, the company which supplies data weather to XM WX.

 

The mechanics of this new utility are simple—satellite radio broadcasts a weather signal that can be picked up by a receiver on a small boat and displayed at the helm as a weather map on either a dedicated screen, or in some cases overlaid on a chart plotter.

 

To set up your boat with the real-time weather display, you’ll need a subscription to either XM WX Satellite Weather or Sirius Marine Weather, an antenna to pick up the signal, and a receiver that interprets the information and provides visual feeds to a display screen at the helm. The hardware—aside from the display screen, which you presumably already have—is currently priced at just under $1,000 and the radio subscription price varies, depending on the level of service you purchase.

 

Information bundled in the broadcast service packages offered by the satellite radio stations may include, as well as basic weather, detailed information such as water temperature, wave height, wave period and direction, wind speed and direction, history of lightning strikes, buoy reports, tropical storm tracks and in some cases, combinations of data assembled to pinpoint conditions that are likely to congregate fish. WxWorx, the data provider for XM WX offers one such package, called “Fish Forecast,” which the company claims can help you locate particular species of fish based on their preferred conditions.

 

Sirius Marine Weather pricing ranges from $29.99 a month for the basics to $99.00 for the Professional level package. XM WX has a range of subscription services from $9.99 for basic service to $49.99 for a Master Mariner package. By the time this news sees print those two entities, XM and Sirius, might be one and the same, if a proposed merger takes place. Then again, they might not. It matters little to the boater—the important thing is that the service is available now, it’s affordable, and it makes every other weather reporting system pretty much obsolete by comparison.

 

Partnerships between satellite radio stations and manufacturers are already well established. XM WX has partnered with Jeppeson Marine, Maptech, VEI, Nauticomp and Garmin, to mention a few. Furuno, Raymarine, and Northstar have hitched up with Sirius. Suffice it to say that the service is here to stay, and many brands of plotters will soon handle one satellite radio feed or the other.

Boaters are enthusiastically embracing the technology. As Jeff Kauzlaric, communications director for Furuno so succinctly described the market, the units are “selling like hotcakes.” In April, Furuno released a new Sirius Weather receiver, the BBWX1, which integrates the Sirius data with Furuno’s NavNet vx2 display. Unlike many other products which display the weather information as a stand-alone image, the NavNet system overlays the weather information onto Furuno’s C-Map Cartography.

 

Raymarine’s C-Series Multifunction Navigation Display enables you to view and animate SIRIUS weather forecasts in a full screen or within a window alongside radar, chart plotter and fish finder functions. “We’re excited to bring this award-winning technology to a wider audience with the launch of our SR50,” said Terry Carlson, president of Raymarine. “This is yet another example of Raymarine’s ability to integrate valuable consumer technologies into boating equipment.”

Also teamed up with Sirius are Northstar and MX Marine, which offer the complete receiver packages to integrate with their individual navigation system displays. These Navico companies offer the complete setup as well for just under $1,000 for the receiver and antenna.

It scarcely does any good to enumerate the chart plotter companies that are putting out products that are compatible with satellite weather imaging. No one is likely to get left off this bandwagon. This technology has every early sign of becoming a basic marine utility, like GPS. Look for prices to fall, and discounting of both gear and services to follow.

 

While it’s just getting off the ground, satellite weather displayed at the helm has all the makings of a boating essential, and it’s a welcome technology for every skipper.