Category: Communications

Maybe I’m missing something, but the Isatphone Pro seems every bit like the game changer Inmarsat claimed it would be.  I’ve made calls from the boat and backyard, sent myself text messages and emails, and replied to them, but have yet to detect a performance issue.  Plus I find the handset easy to use.  And, mind you, this is a sat phone that’s only been shipping for a month or two, and it’s using an Inmarsat I-4 geosynchronous satellite orbiting about 22,000 miles over the equator at 98° West.  As the phone is telling me in the photo above, it does like to have its antenna aimed vaguely at the bird, and I’d guess that would be even truer if I moved further north and/or east, thus putting more atmosphere between the phone and I-4 Americas.  But consider that I’m at about 45°N and 68°W with a lot of trees around me, even to the southwest in the background (and that DirectTV couldn’t get a decent signal here, even on a roof higher than the one you see)…and here’s how I sound:

An interesting new product I didn’t see at the Miami Boat Show is this NaviCom RT650 MOB.  The company site is mostly in French, but MyBoatsGear.com links to a catalog PDF in English, and Foxtrot Marine has the most detail I can find.  This DSC VHF seems to have…

Talk about a blue marble!  Visions of Johanna is now half way from the Galapagos to Easter Island, and very far from home. But Gram Schweikert was able to call my Google Voice mail number from VOJ yesterday, and the recording sounds decent, as you can hear below. He’s going to keep trying the two satcoms system across the Pacific, but he’s already completed the main  testing, as you’ll read after the break, and the news is pretty much all good…

The smaller, cheaper Iridium short-burst data (SBD) modem I heard about at Fort Lauderdale is now official and, wow, doesn’t it look able to “disappear into as many marine devices as possible!” It even has a GPS input/output ports so that it and the modem can easily share a dual-mode antenna.  Hardware and service costs aren’t specified but Iridium is claiming that the 9602 will have “the highest value in the industry.”  I, for one, can’t wait to see devices like the Spot Messenger that are global and bi-directional, and what the MFD and marine security/tracking developers might do with the 9602.  And I’m glad for Iridium that it’s got this and OpenPort going on, because it sure looks like Inmarsat is about to attack its dominance in the satellite phone department…