Does shipping still rely on the shipping forecast though? I’d have thought that there’d be no end of technological doohickeys that did that kind of thing now.
(Genuine Q)
Yes and no.
About as far back as 1985 there was a text based system called navtex which broadcast on MW (about 200 miles offshore) which provided the shipping forecast. Receivers (originally a dot matrix printer, now a LCD screen) cost a couple of hundred quid, and you got weather forecast and any other warnings.
So in those terms it’s been obsolete for almost 4 decades. And there’s even talk of navtex bring switched off now.
And for commercial offshore vessels that will long have been superseded that by satellite internet and subscriptions to better forecasts.
Still feels like a loss though. Even if the only people using it are recreational sailors.
There’s also a difficult to quantify safety case for it, as alluded to above a LW radio is always going to be more reliable than just about any other form of communication. At some point somewhere there’ll be a fishing boat lost in a strom because its expensive doodahh that provided weather forecasts via satellite died and there wasn’t a backup.