Iridium phone airtime

[typhoonNige]

I have been looking at the prepay deals for 12 months and 500 minutes on Iridium phones. Mailasail look competitive. Does anyone have experience of them or other providers? Are there any cheaper ways to get airtime? Any pitfalls to be aware of?

I have the SSB and Pactor modem ready to go but need the phone for emergency contact to and from family.

Any advice appreciated!

 

[ChrisE]

Have you thought of sat phone hire? At places like this >>> http://www.satphone.co.uk/rentals?gclid=CPPbwNaJj70CFSWe2wodWnQA2g

 

[jdc]

I have been looking at the prepay deals for 12 months and 500 minutes on Iridium phones. Mailasail look competitive. Does anyone have experience of them...

I buy my airtime from Mailasail and find them very reliable and easy to deal with. They also send me email reminders when things are about to expire and are quite easy to phone up and get more credit added on. There are a few Mailasail extras it's worth having and using, in particular:
- they will send gribs by an automated email response system
- their blog works well and is quite widely used, and entries are automatically parsed for positions
- an iridium data connection coupled with their 'Express Mail' email compression program is hugely easier for us than HF mail systems, so in the end this has become our sole(1) data comms when on ocean passages or when remote.

So a satisfied customer, albeit with no experience of any other provider.

(1) Edit: not quite true, we do have an HF (aka SSB) transceiver which we use with SeaTTY for receiving faxes, and with RMS Express and Winmoor for data links to other radio amateurs, but to be candid these are more for fun than of necessity. About the only use for SSB data for which there seems no email based equivalent are ice charts (I think because the files are huge: 750kB is typical - for some reason the authorities make them available only as big jpegs, which is very inefficient).

 

[typhoonNige]

Thanks for the responses. I have an Iridium phone (9555) with external antenna already so it is just the airtime I am after. The Mailasail extras will be investigated further. Would the annual 500 minutes be enough for gribs and e-mail? Time will tell! I am drawn to the Sailmail/SSB option by cost considerations but am still unsure how well the system will perform until we get clear of the marina in a couple of weeks.

 

[ribrage]

Take a look on ebay , i bought a card in from the states (no VAT) so either more air time or cheaper than UK

 

[GHA]

Thanks for the responses. I have an Iridium phone (9555) with external antenna already so it is just the airtime I am after. The Mailasail extras will be investigated further. Would the annual 500 minutes be enough for gribs and e-mail? Time will tell! I am drawn to the Sailmail/SSB option by cost considerations but am still unsure how well the system will perform until we get clear of the marina in a couple of weeks.

Where are you off to? I never found a need for satphone unless offshore, local sim or happy hour wifi usually ample. Up side of Mailasail is you can buy just line rental so if you don't use all the minutes you can keep the sim alive, which might be a factor if you're in a place where overnight deliveries can take a month if they happen at all.

 

[typhoonNige]

Where are you off to? I never found a need for satphone unless offshore, local sim or happy hour wifi usually ample. Up side of Mailasail is you can buy just line rental so if you don't use all the minutes you can keep the sim alive, which might be a factor if you're in a place where overnight deliveries can take a month if they happen at all.

We'll be offshore quite a bit as we are off on an Atlantic circuit of sorts, taking in most of the island groups before crossing to the Caribbean next Nov / Dec. We need to be contactable for our families.

 

[Sarnia]

Iridium is the best of phones, total global coverage, time is expensive so you need a system that will exclude spam or unwanted emails to you, ans a system that can compress lots of info into the minutes used.
I know of a such a system and where you can find out for yourself, contact: Ewan Robinson.
ewan@yangosat.com
+44 208 133 9190
www.yangosat.com

A very knowledgeable guy, 20 + years in marine comms. worth checking what he does
Hope this helps

 

[MailASail]

Forgive me answering a post about us...

a) Regarding VAT, mailasail will allow you to sign a disclaimer regarding where you will use the equipment, and if it's outside the EC (ie largely X miles offshore) then we would not charge VAT. You don't need to use an unknown seller on ebay to achieve what is perfectly legal in the UK.

b) Please purchase based on required support, NOT on price. For sure if you don't need support then that expands your choice! However, I have an inbox full of people who tried to save £20 buying from some online buyer, they then write that they waste often hundreds of pounds not using the equipment efficiently... Is this a saving? Bear in mind that MailASail are the only provider who go down to the start of the ARC to do support, this allows us to see something like 200 boats in a short time period and how they get on. My estimate is, unfortunately, although the sat phone is not *difficult* to setup, it's *different* to what people are familiar with, and that's similar to difficult to the "man in the street". So I would suggest that only 10-20% of people get their equipment setup correctly without good support (this means in practice we get asked to visit 70+ boats out of 200 in the week before the ARC...)

c) Beware that many "discount" sellers usually have some form of hidden charge. Either there are activation charges, costs for the SIM, "accidental misbilling" is still common and most common is only allowing large incremental purchases. We hope that offering flexibility keeps customers coming back, so you can order any permutation of topup from us that Iridium will sell to us (my hands are obviously tied by what Iridium will sell...). I hesitate to send links, but click around our website and you can see you can build any plan you wish.

d) We can hire phones if you wish. Just note that you have paid the cost to own it after about 4-6 weeks (based on the estimate that you can buy a phone and sell it again for 50-75% of the buy price). Also renting encourages people to take the phone at the last minute rather than many months before. I can only say that this is a recipe to fail... (Sorry, but this is just a statistical observation based on observing many hundreds of users a year - individuals will of course be different, but I'm afraid we are sad to say we hear the same story *hundreds* of times a year where people buy equipment too late to get familiar with it - please try not to be one of them)

e) I'm posting here as myself because that's how we roll. We think full disclosure is best. Mr Yango is very welcome to drop us a line to consider stocking our Red Box satellite optimiser and teleport-it email compression software? I think our prices are lower, we can offer you better margins and unlike the cleverly named "Optimizer" from GMN (which does *zero* optimisation whatsoever!!) our router has all the optimisation onboard and produces demonstrable results in practice (normal distance selling requires us to offer you a period to put the goods back to us, but if anyone wants to contact offline I'm sure we can arrange a more formal try-before-you-buy and literally if it doesn't do what you want you can send it back - can you say fairer than that?). This is not a hostile response - literally if Mr Yango wants to buy British I think we can offer better product, and better prices than the GMN products from the USA that you are currently offering?

Any questions please feel encouraged to drop us a line at the usual address?

Ed W

P.S. I'm apparently not allowed to offer discounted prices to you guys (odd rule...). However, if someone else wants to contact us and post some details of a surprise airtime discount or hardware offer then I would be delighted to oblige...

 

[temptress]

I looked at SSB vs Sat phone and went with Iridium as our option offshore. It has been very good.


I researched the options and set up everything myself. However I signed up for Mailasail 's services as IMO they were the best option.

Whatever you decide to buy a get it early and get used to it. I have helped out quite a few other people with their setups (Sat and SSR) simply because they had not spent the time to get used to how they work.

 

[Sarnia]

Not sure to whom Mailasail refered to, if indeed it did particularly, but if it did to the recommendation I made to typhoonNige then it is assuming rather a lot re discounts etc. I do know the system I recommended is well worth checking out, and for the buyer to make like for like comparisons.
I am sure Mailasail has many happy customers and good systems to, but so have others in this market, of which I have no financial interest.