HaraldS
Well-Known Member
Thought I'd share my Iridium testing results with you, even though they aren't all complete. Figured I can save you the bottle of Lagavulin that it cost me in air time.
In preparation for doing this at sea soon, I went and tried various ways of retrieving and e-mail with a 31k attachment. For me that is the dayly GRIB file for the weather rounting. I can probably knock that one down to 20k. It was in ZIP compressed form, so usually hard to compress more through Iridiums compression.
All tests were done on a laptop with W2000, but also loads of software installed that could potentially interfere.
First thing which is probably less relevant once on the boat, was that I found I need to reboot my computer if it has previously been connected on a private LAN, otherwise the the Apollo Driver (used for connecting to Iridium) would remain in state "dialing" indefinitely and the phone doesn't show any action.
Inversly, if the Apollo Driver is enabled, the Laptop crashes when trying to put it into standby mode.
One of the theoretically good ideas behind the Apollo software is, that it can disconnect if there is no traffic and then reconnect, when new need arises, pretending to the computer that it was connected all the time. This could save some air time, but could also help you avoid starting over with your transfers from the beginning, if the connection drops for some reason.
Certainly this works for a Web browser, but I have crashed Outlook showing an illegal address refernce and it sends Outlook Express back to the very begin, which is loading the inbox over again.
Clearly the best is to try to do it all during one connection as quick as you can.
I tried thre alternatives to retrive e-mail. (1) Through the Web browser, (2) IMAP using Outlook Express and (3) IMAP using Outlook.
I didn't bother trying MAPI (Microsoft) as this is already hopeless on the cell-phone.
I also didn't try POP3 since it doesn't allow selective mail retrival.
I tried it on two mail servers, fastmail, as was recommended on this forum and our private company mail server (Exchange) which needs to be accessed via VPN.
You may all not bother much about the later, but as a thumb rule, getting the VPN connected takes a bit over 2 minutes over Iridium and after being connected doing mail retrivals seems about 30% slower than straight to fastmail.fm
If your mail client is like mine, checking several mail accounts at various locations, it is time to turn the atomatic checking off for all but the one you want to go for via Iridium.
So the fastmail.fm results are:
(1) Web Browser access: The process of accessing the login page, logging in and displaying the inbox takes 2 minutes 40 seconds. Selecting the target message and loading the attachment of 31kb adds another 2:25, so I had a total connect time of 5:05.
(2) Outlook Express: I started OE in offline mode, went to display the fastmail inbox, selected an already loaded email, then connected via Iridium, and as soon as the connection was established, hit send/receive to refresh. To my surprise it started uploading all mails that were new since the last connection including attachments. Usually only POP has that problem, but I couldn't get around it in OE. There were about a 150kb to be loaded, so I stopped this test.
(3) Outlook: Same procedure as above. It is important to prepare everything, including openning the inbox on fastmail while offline and selecting an already read mail. (If nothing is selected and you connect and refresh, it will select and load the most recent mail, which may not be what you want.) This now worked approximately like I hoped: I connected Iridium, and as soon as this was ready, I hit send/receive. It took 38 seconds and the subject lines of the 5 yet unread emails showed up in the inbox. I quickly selected the one I wanted, opened it and asked to open the attachment. This added another 108 seconds until the file was open and I could disconnect the Iridium connection. Total duration 2:26.
So it seems that fastmail in connection with very careful and planned use of a mail client and IMAP is as good as it gets. Browser access is about twice as expensive.
Hope I could safe you some (air) time. I'll keep you posted if I learn more. In the summer I shall be able to add the experience of doing this via SSB and comapre that to Iridium.
In preparation for doing this at sea soon, I went and tried various ways of retrieving and e-mail with a 31k attachment. For me that is the dayly GRIB file for the weather rounting. I can probably knock that one down to 20k. It was in ZIP compressed form, so usually hard to compress more through Iridiums compression.
All tests were done on a laptop with W2000, but also loads of software installed that could potentially interfere.
First thing which is probably less relevant once on the boat, was that I found I need to reboot my computer if it has previously been connected on a private LAN, otherwise the the Apollo Driver (used for connecting to Iridium) would remain in state "dialing" indefinitely and the phone doesn't show any action.
Inversly, if the Apollo Driver is enabled, the Laptop crashes when trying to put it into standby mode.
One of the theoretically good ideas behind the Apollo software is, that it can disconnect if there is no traffic and then reconnect, when new need arises, pretending to the computer that it was connected all the time. This could save some air time, but could also help you avoid starting over with your transfers from the beginning, if the connection drops for some reason.
Certainly this works for a Web browser, but I have crashed Outlook showing an illegal address refernce and it sends Outlook Express back to the very begin, which is loading the inbox over again.
Clearly the best is to try to do it all during one connection as quick as you can.
I tried thre alternatives to retrive e-mail. (1) Through the Web browser, (2) IMAP using Outlook Express and (3) IMAP using Outlook.
I didn't bother trying MAPI (Microsoft) as this is already hopeless on the cell-phone.
I also didn't try POP3 since it doesn't allow selective mail retrival.
I tried it on two mail servers, fastmail, as was recommended on this forum and our private company mail server (Exchange) which needs to be accessed via VPN.
You may all not bother much about the later, but as a thumb rule, getting the VPN connected takes a bit over 2 minutes over Iridium and after being connected doing mail retrivals seems about 30% slower than straight to fastmail.fm
If your mail client is like mine, checking several mail accounts at various locations, it is time to turn the atomatic checking off for all but the one you want to go for via Iridium.
So the fastmail.fm results are:
(1) Web Browser access: The process of accessing the login page, logging in and displaying the inbox takes 2 minutes 40 seconds. Selecting the target message and loading the attachment of 31kb adds another 2:25, so I had a total connect time of 5:05.
(2) Outlook Express: I started OE in offline mode, went to display the fastmail inbox, selected an already loaded email, then connected via Iridium, and as soon as the connection was established, hit send/receive to refresh. To my surprise it started uploading all mails that were new since the last connection including attachments. Usually only POP has that problem, but I couldn't get around it in OE. There were about a 150kb to be loaded, so I stopped this test.
(3) Outlook: Same procedure as above. It is important to prepare everything, including openning the inbox on fastmail while offline and selecting an already read mail. (If nothing is selected and you connect and refresh, it will select and load the most recent mail, which may not be what you want.) This now worked approximately like I hoped: I connected Iridium, and as soon as this was ready, I hit send/receive. It took 38 seconds and the subject lines of the 5 yet unread emails showed up in the inbox. I quickly selected the one I wanted, opened it and asked to open the attachment. This added another 108 seconds until the file was open and I could disconnect the Iridium connection. Total duration 2:26.
So it seems that fastmail in connection with very careful and planned use of a mail client and IMAP is as good as it gets. Browser access is about twice as expensive.
Hope I could safe you some (air) time. I'll keep you posted if I learn more. In the summer I shall be able to add the experience of doing this via SSB and comapre that to Iridium.
