I have installed the software to support sending a Short Message
(Service) message from your cell phone or other email sending device
that will result in a SMS message being sent back to the sender; such
that you will get a mildly squashed text NOAA buoy report.

The address to send to is "testbuoy@yachtsdelivered.com", without the
quotes.

The subject is the buoy ID number like 46005 or 41101, etc.

Some cell phones will not use "Subject:" in the header that is sent out.
Such phones will NOT receive a buoy report back.

For instance, the Verizon system uses the first few characters of the
MESSAGE as the subject. Their phones do not have a specific box to enter
the subject. I have tested the verizon phone and it works. The Sprint
ones do not.

SMS messages are limited to 160, in some cases 120 characters. This
includes spaces, the subject, AND the return address.

The report you get will have a "B" as the subject and "w@x.uk" as the
return address. The return address is obviously bogus, but something has
to be used to get the email server at my ISP to do its job.

If you use an invalid buoy ID, or garbage you will not get a report.
If too many requests come in at the same time, one may be lost and no
report will be sent. Don't send multiples any faster than about every
minute.

I offer no support, but you can TRY to email me with suggestions or
questions. Mostly I will be monitoring the system and making changes to
improve the reliability.

The testbuoy address will be changed when I am sure that the system
works well and as I see what the load is like. This is all a giant
experiment and you are welcome to participate and get some worthwhile
use of the reports.

The reports are mangled a LITTLE bit, but if you look at the real
reports from NOAA you should not have any trouble reading them.

A cell phone SMS sample follows:
46022 40N  124W  9:50 pm PDT 07/19/09 0450 GMT 07/20/09 W:NNW (3300),
11.7 kt 13.6 kt  S:9.2 ft PP:9 sec    P=N/A

Which you may interpret to read: Buoy 46022 at 40 degrees North, 124
West (TIME) has a Wind from the NNW at 11.7 knots, gusting 13.6. Seas
9.2 feet with a period of 9 seconds. This squashing is necessary to get
the report to go by SMS. There is a bug in that the (TIME) is not always
being entered, this may get fixed soon... I have another machine where I
test fixes without bringing down the production system.

A real report follows:

Station 46022
400 45.0' N  1240 34.6' W

9:50 pm PDT 07/19/09
0450 GMT 07/20/09
Wind: NNW (3300), 11.7 kt
Gust: 13.6 kt
Seas: 9.2 ft
Peak Period: 9 sec
Pres: 29.97 steady
Air Temp: 54.0 0F
Water Temp: 53.1 0F

Wave Summary
10:00 pm PDT 07/19/09
0500 GMT 07/20/09
Swell: 8.2 ft
Period: 9.1 sec
Direction: NNW
Wind Wave: 3.6 ft
Period: 4.3 sec
Direction: NNW

The system is active as of this minute and I intend for it to be active
24 hours a day. There are no promises or warranties, you know the rest.

This is running on my home computer, on a machine that is only used very
rarely for anything else. The response time can be as little as 10
seconds or so; average about 1 minutes. Anything over about 10 minutes
is probably due to some transient problem that can't be fixed or located.

Mike

Capt. Mike Maurice
Tigard, Oregon (Near Portland).

There is ONE monkey wrench in the gearbox in regards to these cellphone
emails. The ISP has a spam blocker which may catch your incoming email
buoy request. After some period of time: hours, days, centuries I get
around to checking the held messages in which case I can unblock them
and you will get your delayed report. In other words, if your first
attempt to get a report does not work, don't despair, it is probably
just on hold. If you get a report with a long delay you can assume that
is what happened.

This problem is being worked on and should not happen frequently, but
you have been warned.

Bill Petrie tried this morning and got his buoy report.
By the way, the from and other data to get the buoy report is not
something that is being saved to distribute to the SPAMMERS of the
Universe. At the moment the names disappear as soon as the next request
comes in.

Mike

Capt. Mike Maurice
Tigard, Oregon (Near Portland).

Reasons for why if you request a buoy report and get either:
NO response or the response has no information.

Be sure your email program does not send HTML, the message must be in
plain text. If it is in HTML then the buoy number MUST be in the subject
(this may not work reliably).

Email from US Cell phone providers will generally make it past the SPAM
filters and not be held.

ANY other cell phone or email servers will likely be held until I can
manually unblock it. I am not prepared to whitelist individual users to
avoid the hold ups, so be prepared to see delays in getting reports if
you are not sending from a cell phone, and if sending from a cell phone
until I have added your carrier to the whitelist. If you are sending
from a cell phone and that carrier is not whitelisted, they will be
after the first attempt that I come across in the held mail, which may
not come to my attention for some hours.

SPRINT is not working correctly. You will get a response, but NOT a
report ?!!!{& arg***...

Most GSM phones will truncate the returning report to 70 characters. A
fix will take some kind of trick, like sending the report in two emails.
ATT and Sprint are apparently GSM. Verizon is CDMA and will take a 160
character message.

Failure to get ANY reply; possibilities.
Held by spam filter at my ISP.
OR
Held by your spam filter at your incoming ISP.
Check your held mail.

Cell phone carriers are using all kinds of tricks to save space, like
not using space characters even where the normal email spec says they
should be used. this complicates the decoding of the incoming email buoy
report request. I think this is fixed.

I hope this answers some of the questions I have received.

Regards,
Mike

Capt. Mike Maurice
Tigard, Oregon (Near Portland).

Update: AT&T, Sprint and other GSM phones should now work for getting
buoy reports.

Sending a request from your normal email program will likely result in
the request being held up in my ISP's spam filters until I release them,
you have been warneddd.....

Mike

Capt. Mike Maurice
Tigard, Oregon (Near Portland).

I made a mistake in using Buoy 46005 as an example as it is NOT in
service at the moment. No report will return from such an request.

A good buoy is 46029

Regards,
Mike

Capt. Mike Maurice
Tigard, Oregon (Near Portland).

I have installed an alternate email box where the buoy reports can be
requested. If the "testbuoy@yachtsdelivered.com" won't get you a report
you can try "buoy2@dcl.com" as an alternate.

dcl.com is a completely different system and should be active even if
the other email server is down. If the machines at my place are down
from a power failure or internet cable provider failure, well you will
just have to wait (that only happens a couple of times a year generally
during lightening storms). But this duplicate email box will provide
some protection.

The dcl.com address should be more tolerant of email from non cell
phones, like from your regular email program. In other words the spam
filter is more sophisticated and less likely to hold your request up.
The testbuoy address is the primary and the dcl is the secondary. This
sequence may be changed depending on the testing over the next few weeks.

Regards,
Mike

Capt. Mike Maurice
Tigard, Oregon (Near Portland).

I have installed an alternate email box where the buoy reports can be
requested. If the "testbuoy@yachtsdelivered.com" won't get you a report
you can try "buoy2@dcl.com" as an alternate. By the way, if you can't
spell (BUOY) and have to spell it "bouy" which is not a valid spelling,
you will not die, or dye, as even that has been fixed, for those of you
who can't yet spell. Don't ask how this problem was overcome...

In order to prevent some ISPs like verizon from deleting mail without
warning I have resorted to using a valid web address as the return
address: d@dcl.com or t@dcl.com. You can tell if the message came from
the testbuoy address by the "t" before the dcl.com OR directly from
dcl.com if there is a "d" before the dcl.com. DCL.com is a valid system
but these are not working email addresses in any event. Using the longer
return address, instead of "w@x.uk", uses up space for the real message,
but it really can't be helped as it caused too many people to never get
a response.

All this has been tested with verizon, comcast, yahoo, gmail, outlook,
thunderbird, sprint, at&t, and various other programs and most
everything now works, using one or the other of the mail box addresses.

If you tried this earlier and it did not work, now is the time to try it
again.

I have a plan to run one of the mail boxes COMPLETELY separated
physically as well as virtually so that no storm can kill both mailboxes
at the same time.

Regards,
Mike

Capt. Mike Maurice
Tigard, Oregon (Near Portland).

The buoy report by SMS has had the following features added.

There are 2 independent mailboxes, as previously reported.
the buoy2@dcl.com and testbuoy@yachtsdelivered.com

They both run continuously, 24 hours a day.
If the PRIMARY outgoing mail server fails, the other mail server will be
used. A few days ago the primary one failed for about 6 hours. This fix
should take care of that problem.

You can request up to 4 buoys or C-Man station IDs at one time, like so:

46029,46022, etc.

This will result in multiple messages returned to you.

If your cell phone will not allow these IDs in the subject line, they
may be placed on the FIRST line of the message and will be handled just
as if they had been placed proper.

If you enter an invalid buoy ID, or IF the buoy report can't be acquired
from NOAA at that moment, you will get a message to that effect.
The FAIL message will have the ID that you requested.

A list of presently available buoy or C-Man station IDs can be found at
this web link:

ftp://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/marine/latest_obs/

NOTE: only the buoy and C-Man station IDs at the ftp site above can be
accessed at this time by the SMS Buoy Report system. These are generally
the buoys owned by the US and Canada. Other buoys world wide are not
available.

A MAP showing the buoys world wide is at:
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/rmd.shtml

Regards,
Mike

Capt. Mike Maurice
Tigard, Oregon (Near Portland).