Does anyone know about sat phones?

[David52]

Afternoon all.

Planning some extended cruising in the Indian ocean down to Oz. Wanted any advice or anecdotes reference sat phones etc. that might be useful..

Any advice or observations welcome.

Cheers,

GB

 

[Cliveshep]

From £370 on e-bay. Don't know anything about them 'cept you need a sim card as well.

 

[Dave99]

top up with credit - cheap to call other sat phones. Thuruya is pretty good in terms of deals but check the coverage for your area

 

[Guest]

We used Inmarsat Mini-M. There was a small official dead area but we did not find it as they were playing around with the "spare". Now that they have the new generation going up, the plan is for full coverage.

Of the Iridium users the only comment is that due to their polar orbits the worst coverage is the equator! Sometimes the call is easy sometimes not.

However, what ever you do I suggest you use the "uuplus" service to get email. They have good source filtering and don't use the normal ping pong IP type protocol that kills long distance links.

Using a normal dialup ISP it was minutes to check the email. With uuplus I got it down to 19 seconds to send a small email and check for any waiting.

Why the Indian Ocean for Australia? It is easier the other way.

 

[ParaHandy]

Iridium's sat system will give you voice+data. Inmarsat appears not to have data coverage where you're going.

Fit an external antenna and iridium's ok. bit like very early internet - slow and clunky. Cost isn't that bad - iridium's a lot cheaper than my orange mobile in eg caribean. TYpically can get off emails in 20-30secs (although doesn't save much as the buggers charge by the minute). Receiving a weather text forecast plus 1200m 5 day grib takes about 1min on a good day. Test email prog & service and laptop before you go. Mailasail's good for email service; good compression of data and some safeguards.

 

[npf1]

Last time I used one (18 months ago) Globalstar was cheaper to buy, cheaper on calls plus had the fastest data speed - still only of 9.6kbps but that's four times faster than iridium. There's no coverage in some areas but if there is where you are heading it's worth consdering.

Whichever system you use, consider using the mail and weather software from www.ocens.com - v.easy to use, saves a bundle on call charges plus loads of weather info.

 

[Toutvabien]

For an Atlantic circuit we have purchased a Motorola 9500 from eBay for £300, Iridium 500 minutes sim card £400, from Mailasail. As Parahandy says we can do an email send and recieve in less than a minute. Obviously nothing but text and grib files. good advice on the Mailasail website, IMHO.