Prout Owners Association

Does anybody have experience of satellite telephones in their boat?
I am interested in 1) the least expensive fixed system 2)the lowest running costs - costs of usage... to be used as a ww telephone and to get into the the 'net'....
Many thanks

Michael

Hi Michael,

I used an iridium system, twelve years back already. Good and very reliable, covers all relevant parts of the world, picks up and locks on a signal easily. Must take great care using it: being called is excessively expensive, so what you do is make an arrangement to get an sms from people who want to talk to you. This is free! Then you call them, I think it is about a dollar a minute.

There is an activation fee however, and your credit lasts for no more than 90 days. It is not a pay as you go system - you have to buy your credit before you start calling away.

For data: really slow and very limited bandwidth. Would not recommend it. Moreover, it is connection time based and not data based. If you have been waiting for 5 minutes and there is no traffic - you pay for 5 minutes connection time. We had weather forecasts made by a shore captain and he sent us the forecast by sms - free.

In case you want to try: I have one lying over here that I do not use at the moment

Kind regards,

Robert

Hello Michael,
I have been using an Iridium 9505 sat phone with modem connected to my laptop using Sailmail and it has worked nearly flawlessly. To save airtime usage, I log on once a day downloading new emails & uploading earlier composed emails. Later, I answer and compose more emails off-line for the next log-in session. A sat phone for sending emails is easy to use and may not very costly if used conservatively. I am now interested in trying one of the systems using Iridium for sending SMS. For more information - http://www.textanywhere.ca/ or http://www.inreachdelorme.com/