deployment communications

[Tom Hannan]

my son will be making his first sea deployment every soon. Is regular letters via mail the only way to keep in touch or is email available aboard ship ?

[Patrick Cashin]

and make sure you pull the strings tightly... really funny jim!

[NavyDads Admin (Paul)]

as Tim said, e-mail can be really iffy depending on security conditions and sat comm condiitons. There is limited bandwidth available and the sailors are pretty busy so don't expect email on a regular basis.....at least that is what I learned from my two sailors on deployments. We never sent snail mail letters....I might have put some notes in care packages, but those can take several weeks to get there. Eric did call from Dubai on Christmas morning as they were in port on his iPhone....cost him a fortune!!!

[NavyDads Admin, Tim]

Tom,
Email on the ships sometimes is shotty at best. Snail mail to a ship in the middle of nowhere is slower than normal, has to go from ship to ship when it gets to where his ship is deployed. Trevor asked for phone cards when he was on the ship because the calls that are made to numbers outside the area code of where the ship is based is a long distance call.
When the ship ports the sailors can go into town and find internet for a fee. Nothing like the free wi-fi at Mcdonalds and IHOP that we have here. I think Trevor paid $25 for 2 hours worth of internet access while in port. Hope this helps out some more.
Tim

[MikeU]

You can send mail, email or your sailor can call you from the public phones on the ship. He will get assigned an email address when he arrives on the ship. My son is currently deployed on a ship and I get regular emails from him. However, many jobs on the ship don't have access to a computer so they sometimes have to wait their turn to use the public computers. Hope that helps.