Sat Phones.

Alistairr

Alistairr

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Any advise on Sat Phones? Do you have one and if so what are the usage costs, do you need a contract or can it be pay as you go?

What are pit falls of Sat Phones?

Also the handsets, what do you recommend?

Thanks in advance.
Alistairr.
 
I have one otherwise I'm not allowed to sail on my own.
Iridium 9505 with spare battery, external aerial and pc connection.
I buy time as I need it, but it is not cheap.
 
I have an Iridium Extreme using a hardwired low cost external fixed antenna on the rail that I’ve had for about 3 years.. It replaces a secondhand Iridium handset that I bought on eBay that turned out to be an unreliable mistake. I buy airtime up front from Mailasail and use it daily to upload grib weather files and professional weather forecast emails. I also post a blog (without photos) and altogether it probably costs me less than $2 per day. The Iridium Extreme also has a DSC facility that I regard essential for long distance offshore cruising as I don’t have SSB.
Setting up the pc connection was relatively easy but you have to appreciate that background programmes and anti virus software will eat your airtime rapidly if you don’t disable them.
 
Alistairr said:
Any advise on Sat Phones? Do you have one and if so what are the usage costs, do you need a contract or can it be pay as you go?

What are pit falls of Sat Phones?

Also the handsets, what do you recommend?

Thanks in advance.
Alistairr.
Click to expand...

We have an Irridum. It is imo cheaper than SSB once you take into account the acquisition costs. We buy airtime from Maiasail and use it to download grib files, send a few emails and recieve calls. It is expensive to both make calls to and from the Satphone but we have it as an emergency and use it when we cannot get any mobile signal or ashore to use a phone box. Relatively simple to use and set up. I highly recommend using Mail-A-Sail they will help you to get going..
 
IridiumGO. It sets up a wifi zone on your boat and you use your mobile to make calls. I also connect a laptop and tablet for email, gribs etc. Unlimited data on the most popular subscription which last season was $125 for month from memory. The minimum plan is one month. I'm pleased with it for offshore use.
 
. I highly recommend using Mail-A-Sail they will help you to get going..

Mail Docs is great for getting gribs and text forecasts via satphone and I'm sure offer an excellent service if you sign up, but they gave me very misleading advise about IridiumGO when I was shopping around for a sat phone. In fact plain wrong advise, I suspect because they wanted me to buy their system. I have found IridiumGo excellent, easy to set up and with a perfectly adequate email system.
 
We have Inmarsat Isatphones to use with our trans Atlantic yacht deliveries or longer ocean passages. They work very well.

Have you considered a tracker with two way comms? They are perfect for texting and you can have someone text you weather updates and routeing advice. Much cheaper than a sat phone.

Pete
 
I bought my Idirium phone before a UK-NZ trip just before the iridium Go came out.

I wish I had been better informed and got the Go as we ended up spending a heap of money on airtime which was more than an annual go subscription plan and in reality for a very limited amount fo data/minutes.
 
The biggest disadvantage of Sat phones is definitely not the fact that prices are high since that is completely normal. The main difficulty in using the satellite phones is that they can only work when a direct line of sight exists with the sky. Because of that, using the phones in covered areas or inside buildings is not possible. You will find it a little difficult to get coverage if you are near a tall building or if the weather is too bad. At the same time, the satellite phones are normally larger than the regular mobile phones you are used to...
 
The biggest disadvantage of using Sat phones are definitely not the fact that prices are high since that is completely normal. The main difficulty in using the satellite phones is that they can only work when a direct line of sight exists with the sky. Because of that, using the phones in covered areas or inside buildings is not possible. You will find it a little difficult to get coverage if you are near a tall building or if the weather is too bad. At the same time, the satellite phones are normally larger than the regular mobile phones you are used to.
 
We had a second hand iridium sat phone for our circumnavigation- it sort of worked for email, blog updates, downloading gribbfiles etc; but in retrospect I would shell out for a new one next time. With ours, I had to wedge myself in a suitable position in the cockpit whilst finding a good angle for the aerial, simultaneously trying to hold the whole unit perfectly still because the cable connecting phone to computer was dodgy. In big rolling swell and high winds or other poor weather this was really not easy. In fact the dodgy connection nearly killed us once- I was trying to hold position, sat in the cockpit for about an hour, facing aft and not daring to even turn my head as the connection kept cutting out just as the downloads started; my partner was down below staring and swearing hard at the laptop- both of us so focused that neither of us noticed the huge container ship on a collision course with us until it passed so close it blocked out the sun, it was literally the proverbial biscuit toss away. Brown bikini bottom moment of the whole trip and a very salutary lesson to keep a watch by all means at all times even in the middle of an ocean when you’ve seen nothing for days and days!
 
We used an Iridium GO on our transat at last year. Simple to use and flexible, you could use it for voice or data. Only downside was without an external antenna it needed to be outside with a clear sight of the sky.
However, I reckon that we got more use out of the Delorme InReach. That lived below in its holder yet had no trouble maintaining a connection to the satellite. It sent a tracking signal every 30 minutes, updating our position which friends and family could follow via a website. It handled text messaging to any phones or tablets on board via a Bluetooth link. For an additional subscription, you could get grib forecasts as and when you requested them. The cost of the kit was a lot lower than the Iridium GO as was the subscription in comparison to the GO air time. Only thing it wouldn't do is voice.
 
duncan99210 said:
We used an Iridium GO on our transat at last year. Simple to use and flexible, you could use it for voice or data. Only downside was without an external antenna it needed to be outside with a clear sight of the sky.
However, I reckon that we got more use out of the Delorme InReach. That lived below in its holder yet had no trouble maintaining a connection to the satellite. It sent a tracking signal every 30 minutes, updating our position which friends and family could follow via a website. It handled text messaging to any phones or tablets on board via a Bluetooth link. For an additional subscription, you could get grib forecasts as and when you requested them. The cost of the kit was a lot lower than the Iridium GO as was the subscription in comparison to the GO air time. Only thing it wouldn't do is voice.
Click to expand...

I have as you described, the Garmin InReach, plus a HF ICOM 801E and Pactor 4 modem. Add a Iridium 9505 and we have all the angles covered... still prefer the HF as the SAT comms are rarely as good as one hopes...
 
Thanks for all the information everyone.

Seems a lot more investigations are needed before committing to one, running cost and contracts seem to be the main issue.

Thanks again,
Alistairr.
 
The Iridium handset and the Go work very well for WX downloads at sea - provided you make the effort to have a good installation, and follow best practices for their use. Also, it helps to understand what they are capable of, and what they are not capable of.

A good installation has a permanently mounted external antenna - note this is not the little "hockey puck" magnetic car antenna.

Best practices takes some time to figure out.., but it always starts with a specialized email service optimized for sat phone data connections. I use Xgate, but there are others. You get an email account on their server, with a .gmn-usa domain. Then pretty much all WX is obtained though email requests. I mostly use saildocs, but there are other options. You can get gribs, surface analyses, surface forecasts, text discussions and forecasts - everything you need.

all the iridium handsets - the 9500, 9505, 9555, 9575 extreme, as well as the Go all have the same native data speed - 2.4kb/sec, although you will some times see the claim that 9.4kb/sec can be achieved through compression. because most of what you are downloading is already compressed, the gains are minimal
 
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