Satellite Phones

[Guest]

For safety and weather routing etc., I am considering the use of satellite phones whilst cruising in European waters. The Thuraya system looks like an interesting package ( http://www.thuraya.com ) but there are so many other systems around that are also worth a look. Does anyone have any experience in using these systems for email, web browsing, SMS text, voice and fax etc?

It could be that ordinary mobile phones would fulfill my needs for most areas unless I am well offshore and out of range. Whilst crossing the North Sea recently from Stavanger to Inverness, there was coverage from repeater stations on oil / gas rigs. Is there any similarly broad coverage, from whatever source, in Biscay and Med?

 

[ccscott49]

Biscay no go, Meddy, most places seem to be covered, up to about 25 miles offshore, but then again you change countries fairly quickly, so need a UK phone with roaming for those times. I use mobile for e mail etc. Haven't yet found the need for satellite. (not cheap either)

 

[Solstice]

My son used an Iridium sat. phone whilst taking part in last years Atlantic rowing race from Teneriffe to Barbados and found it excellent. Connected to a Hewlett Packard Jornada it was fine for emails as well as voice. If he had taken a laptop I suppose that he could also have used it for browsing the internet but at 1 US dollar per minute it would have been a bit pricy.

For European waters though I would have thought that a sat. phone was a bit over the top

 

[ranga]

For good information about browsing the internet via Iridium, compressed emails etc check out www.mailasail.com. It is amazing how quickly a text browser delivers web pages even on a 2400k Iridium connection (you just don't get all the pictures, adverts etc). I used this service successfully on my trip down to Tenerife recently and will be continuing to use it all the way back to Oz.

This service is also useful on any low bandwidth connection, like your mobile.

 

[HaraldS]

Have been using cell-phone, Iridium and HF-e-mail on this years trip. Results were a bit mixed.

For the cell-phone I used a global provider with a business account that has dail in points in most countries. When near land it almost always worked fine and was by far superior to the other two means, yet slow by any comparison to DSL at home or fibre at the office. Browsing the internet beyond just loading a few images from wetterzentrale.de it is simply too slow and expensive. E-mail worked fine and I was sending out reports with 1.5MB of pictures every ten days.

While Iridium worked well when I tried it at home, it wasn't very workable when I tried it between Ireland and the Azores. Voice was fine, except that in this area it seemd to forward between satellites with the result of a huge propagation delay which seemed to upset the Apollo software enaough to not get any images across. Also IMAP to fastmail.fm had porblems.

In this case I was using Iridium as the internet provider, which supposedly should give a better throghput through compression. I found the associated software quite flaky and inmature. Asides from conflicts with the wireless lan, it crashed the laptop when trying to go into sleep mode, required the UART Fifos to be turned off, which no other software likes and so on.

So, I would say a good and economic voice phone, but ways to go before I'll enjoy using it for data.

I then reverted to HF-email via Kiel radio, to get minimalistic e-mail (works very well) and weather routing files (GRIB) from MaxSea. For the later I reduced my selection to create a response of around 10 kbyte.

It worked reasonably well, but you need to check a couple of ties a day to see how good a connection you may get. It's enough to listen to the free signal on various frequencies to determine that.

Aparently a known problem is that this isn't working to well in the Azores. Still the software is a contrast in quality to the Iridium stuff, very robust and it will get your data over the worst link, when you can barely hear that there is a signal.

The theoretic maximum speed is 2700Bd, but I only got this once between Azores and Madeira, usually the signal isn't good enough to support such a rate.

I would imagine that the Thuraya phone would work better than Iridium, since it does no forwarding, yet with its geo-stationary satellites it will always incure some of that, and that will usually slow down the effective data rate quite a bit. For the areas I'm sailing the Thuraya wasn't a choice so I didn't give it any further thought.

 

[dk]

I've been using a Thuraya phone in Greece, Italy and France this year. The voice side is great, and one advantage is that the SIM card is the same for satellitte or GSM, so your number is always the same. Switching networks is simply a question of selecting your preferred method in the main menu.
Since I've been back in the UK I've connected it up to the data link and sent/recieved emails and faxes. The speed seems slightly better than Iridium, which I used during the ARC last year for voice/data. Both take a bit of setting up with the laptop - as following the handbook never works! It is also better to use a stripped service such as mailasail.com and turn off all images on your browser. Even so, surfing the web is a slow and expensive business.
Actually, the Thuraya and Iridium services can sometimes be cheaper than GSM if you don't use a local SIM, or have a special international rate like O2's ITS. Thuraya is around £750 for the phone, then £0.72 - £1.33/min (usually around 91p/min Europe back to UK).

 

[ccscott49]

Whats the coverage of thurya? Please.

 

[dk]

According to the blurb, Europe, Central Asia, Middle East, N & Central Africa and India only. Not the USA or the Atlantic.

 

[pkb]

I was thinking of a sat phone recently and talked to a major marine electronics supplier who suggested that refurbished Iridium phones were available on the market and much much cheaper than new - about £250 I seem to recall. A major saving to offset the cost of usage?

Peter

 

[zefender]

ebay is full of them. I bought mine from there. However, bear in mind that the earlier Motorola ones cannot be adapted/upgraded for data - something to with 'firmware' I think. For voice they are fine, though there is a bit of a delay and SWMBO reckoned I'd been drinking everytime I spoke to here on it. Has therefore v.good alibi potential.

Be aware too that some apparently new phones have been permanently blocked by Motorola when they took the business over as they couldn't be accounted for at the time. I got caught like this, though the supplier did change it for me.

 

[dk]

Yes - that's what we used last year. However, you have to make sure you get the data enabled MkII version. It works fine, but you don't have the easy Satellite/GSM switch over, and the phones are nearly twice the size of the Thuraya ones.