SSB e-mail vs Iridium email

[Guest]

I am keen to hear from people who use Iridium and SSB e-mail. I am trying to decide between Iridium and SSB for my communications system. It seems that the set up costs of a Sat phone are roughly £500 less than those of SSB. The monthly line rental for a sat phone roughly equates to the annual membership fee of SailMail. So the fifference is obviously free airtime albeit limited to ten minutes on Sailmail compared to $1.50/minute using sat phone.

Sat phone therefore is obviously more expensive after you have used the first 400 minutes of airtime. But is sailmail a total nightmare, do connections reguarly fail etc, compared to sat phone? I will be using it all over the world.

Many thanks

Will

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[snowleopard]

all over the world?

doubt you will have much luck with sailmail more than 2000 miles from their base station.

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[ccscott49]

I don't have either, but I will be considering iridium, rather than SSB. But I will await comments on this one.

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[snowleopard]

iridium

before we set out we looked very closely at iridium, especially as recond handsets were available at the time. the most valuable lesson was to make sure the connection is working properly before you leave home as the software relied on a very precise set of version numbers for the non-iridium components (windows, outlook etc.)

the other clincher for us was the cost to our kids of phoning us, estimates varied from £2 per minute upwards and no-one would give us a definitive answer.

those we met who had the sustem said that they had quite a few breakdowns so wouldn't rely on it. this may have been old kit, i don't know.

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[ccscott49]

Re: iridium

To be honest, I wont need iridium or any other SSB or Sat based system for a couple of years yet, so I'll wait, theres a few newer systems in the offing and I'll wait until I really need them, which may be never! Mini "M" may be all I require, just for E mails and weather, but we'll see. When I retire I don't want high priced comms gear.

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[HaraldS]

I used both last summer and as a result I plan to do the same again this year.

Iridium:

Worked fine when I tried it at home and with some toying around for some $50 air time, I got to a point where I could get signed on via IMAP protocol to my mail server at Fastmail.fm and with call duration of just over 2 minutes get the subject lines listed. From then on mail goes roughly at the 2400bd that the phone gives you. Mostly I wanted the Grib files for weather routing which are about 20k when you carefully select area and samples.

When I tried to do the same at sea, somewhere half way from Ireland to the Azores, I did get a connection, but never got any serious amount of data over it. The mail client timed out and also trying access via web browser worked for a page or so and then timed out gain. My current explanation for that problem is that when you are at a position where Iridium forwards between satellites before findung a ground station, propagation delays go up to a degree that lets these protocols fail. Using it as a phone I noticed substantial delay, so that you where almost tempted to use it half duplex and say "over" when you're done talking.

Fiddling around with it I burned another huge amount of air time and finally was so p....d off, that I only used Iridium for voice, for the rest of the journey.

May using one of the stallite specialist providers like UU-plus would work better.
By now I have calmed down enough to give it another try this summer, but I will also renew my subscription to SSB e-mail, via Kielradio.

SSB e-mail via Kielradio: When I had no succes with Iridium, I went and tried SSB and to my surprise it was an instant success. In theory the maximum data rate that PActor III gives is 2700bd, in practise it was a lot less and I would usually wait 20 -25 minutes for the 15-20k grib file to come in. That is more than the daily ten minute allocation, which Kielradio didn't seem to enforce. If they would I would probably consider it useless aswell. I usually went and checked reception several times a day, and when I had a clear signal on one of their frequencies, I'd go ahead and try my luck. That way I always got my file, on each passage day.

In the Acores the reception was very poor, and Mr. Reincke from Kielradio told me that they knew this, but didn't know why. Half way to Madeira from there it started working again. Aslo quite good on the passage from Madeira to Cadiz.

Though I think it should work better and faster and it may well be that my rig has a problem. Unusually I seem to ba able to transmit very well, but reception is not so good and I get a much better signal, also of short wave radio stations on my weather receiver. Something I need to investigate further.

For the SSB transceiver I have tried my isolated backstay and a 5.6m whip. The later seems slightly better. The weather receiver is fed from an active masthead antenna. The Transceiver is an Icom 710 RT. Just the other day I was trying this again when I was listening to news on 9MHZ shortwave, and the 710 delivered a lousy and fading signal, when I got a a very clear reception in the weather receiver. So I think SSB should work better than what I experienced, yet it still woked better for me than Irdium.

As to cost, I think Ipaid as much on air time trying to make Iridium work, as I did for the anual subscription to Kielradio.

Some of my friends are using winlink, the HAM based free e-mail and are very happy with it, so maybe that's worth a try.

I'll do some more investigation this summer.





<hr width=100% size=1><A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.taniwani.de>http://www.taniwani.de</A>

 

[Heckler]

hey col

did you ever do portishead radio portishead radio this is texas 2 calling portishead radio?
texas 2 texas 2 this is portishead radio, what is your position?
portishead radio this is texas 2 we are at the mouth of the congo river,
texas 2 stand by while we adjust the antenna.
texas two standing by
texas 2 this is portishead radio, what can we do for you?
portishead radio this is texas 2, can we have a reverse charge call to *******
please.
texas 2 that is affirmative you are second inline to HMS sheffield standby
hms sheffield helo luv how are you? who? this is john, met you in the texas bar? you whar? GET ORF PERVERT.
texas 2 this is portishead radio you are conected nopw, go ahead,
good old days. do they still do that?
stu


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[zefender]

Re: Iridium phones

Just a note of warning about iridium phones. I bought one from ebay - all boxed and unused last year for only about £300. Its a Motorola older model which looks like a brick. Pretty its not. The phone worked fine though for voice so I bought the data kit for email. I then found that the firmware on the early versions of Motorola handsets is not able to be upgraded to take data. So any bargain hunter should be careful if more than voice is wanted.

FWIW, the Iridium phone worked very well across Biscay and down the Iberian coast. There is a delay in the transmission though and voices are a little warped. Mrs Zefender thought I was drunk every time we spoke - so it was handy to be able to blame the equipment!

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[Guest]

Re: Iridium phones

Zefender,
I too have an Iridium phone of the same vintage as yours.I have been told that friends and relatives can send text messages via a website free of charge- have you tried this facility? or the voice mail?We intend going foreign later this year and are planning on a daily check of the text message facility to make sure everything is ok at home so we would be very interested to know if it does what it says on the tin.

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[ashley]

Re: Iridium phones

Here is the link for paging iridium: <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.iridium.com/service/iri_service-detail.asp?serviceid=3>http://www.iridium.com/service/iri_service-detail.asp?serviceid=3</A>

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