The Sonrisa Net is a friendly and relaxed HAM net that meets daily on 3968khz LSB at 13:30z to support cruisers in the Sea of Cortez and Pacific Mexico. For many years Geary Ritchie, WB6PKH, would wake up every morning at 4am to collect data and prepare a daily weather report. He would then deliver his report at 15 minutes ’til the hour to boaters and land-based stations up and down the Sea. He also founded the sonrisanet.org web site to help deliver his information.

Sadly, Geary is no longer with us. The new sonrisanet.org is a small attempt to fill the gap. No, I’m not going to wake up every morning at 4am to collect data. The goal is to create a tool to automatically collect weather data relevant to sailors in the area and present it in a format that is easy for the net controller to read over the air.

The secondary goal, fortunately highly compatible with the first, is to make this information available to low bandwidth connections, such as WinLink or SailMail over the HF airwaves, or satellite internet connections. We plan to make the data available through Saildocs or something like it in the near future. There are plenty of graphical sites available to those with solid internet connections, and we have no intention to duplicate that, although we may provide convenient links.