Entertainment
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Entertainment
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ENTERTAINMENT: Indeed, a small sailboat is no place for dance and music entertainment, but everybody likes a bit of music from time to time or maybe just being able to get the latest news from the outside world, and all this without having to resort to complicated setups! - CAR-RADIO/CD PLAYER:
Both on Shaula3 as well as on Shaula4, we installed a simple car-radio with an integral CD-player: we opted for a model equipped with RDS (which shows on the screen the name of the station being tuned-in, a handy feature when you are constantly having to re-tune the radio to the local stations!). When we bought the radio for Shaula4, we had to acknowledge that CD-players are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, being replaced by the ability to interface external mp3-players or memory sticks. We kept looking and finally found one, but maybe we should have bent to the technological evolution. Obviously a car radio needs an external aerial, even more so being installed inside a metal hull! On both boats, we solved this need by using a splitter on the VHF aerial's cable. On Shaula3 we also wasted time and money to install a sophisticated device which was supposed to allow sharing the same pair of cockpit-installed speakers between car-radio and SSB, but it never worked! For the time being we have not addressed this problem on Shaula4, also in view of the fact that we found out that very seldom we were listening to music in the cockpit, due to lack of time or inclination. During sailing, especially at night, we were rather listening to music from an mp3 reader's earphones. - MULTI-BAND RADIO: When we acquired Shaula3, we found on-board an excellent SONY multi-band radio, which would have been able to receive long-distance broadcasts, besides local MF and FM transmissions. In reality, this radio was a double of the car-radio and of the SSB (which was also an excellent short-medium wave receiver), so that we used it very seldom. We also found out that reception was problematic when away from shore, we would probably have needed a well-thought-out antenna to improve reception. The same radio followed us on Shaula4, but also here we need to find its place in the general strategy: on this boat we have no SSB, so it would be very convenient to be able to receive weather forecasts on short-wave and maybe even meteo-fax transmissions, we will need to spend some time on it and its antenna system! - EXTERNAL SPEAKER: Being able to listen to music in the cockpit may be a matter of tastes, but being able to hear the VHF radio, especially when motoring, is a matter of safety! On Shaula3 we found the external microphone/remote control of the VHF radio to be very handy, albeit a bit poor at withstanding the weather. The Raymarine set we bought for Shaula4 would allow the same, but we would have to buy a second, very expensive remote set: its a pending decision, we will see after some practical experience, for the time being a cockpit-mounted speaker will have to do. - TV SET:
Somebody, like our son Lorenzo, believes a TV set on a boat is a sort of blasphemy, but in fact it may justify itself in the long winter nights in port or to be able to receive news from the outside world! On Shaula3 we even had a fixed installation, with a nice SONY TV installed in the main cabin and an external GLOMEX aerial on the stern archway. Reception was not always satisfactory, although this is to be expected with mobile installations, and of course the signal is often too weak when at anchor in secluded coves. Besides the TV we also had a small DVD-player, which we used very seldom to watch movies that we bought around the world. All considered, we often have been able to receive some local broadcast when we were in port: the top was in Australia, where we have been able to follow the main events of the Beijing Olympics and every morning we could watch the Italian news of the day before, re-broadcast by a local station. On Shaula4 for the time being we are limiting ourselves to a
small portable TV with an external aerial, but we had big reception problems in
the location where the boat is moored: also the switchover to digital-TV is not
helping, reception is bad even back home! Continue reading at the page concerning Safety systems
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Webmaster: Gianfranco Balducci - email: gfbalduc@tin.it Last Update: 07/09/2017
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