Wednesday 13 May 2015

Iridium Go!

That's the Satphone finally fitted and working. Lynne very sensibly took herself off shopping in Preston and left me to curse and puzzle out the three dimensional jigsaw puzzle of leading the very heavy cable from the new external antenna to the Iridium Go! Thingy at the chart table.


The  antenna is the long lozenge shaped one, we are running out of space for them!
Luckily after completely emptying the cockpit locker ( this is big enough to smuggle a whole family of refugees ) the cable cooperated right up until about 2 feet from the target, foiled by an impossible drilling angle in a locker. Peter Manning again came through with a solution with the loan of a right angled drill chuck head, what a useful piece of kit!


So that's the job done, what this little thing does is to create a satellite ' hotspot', it's a network router if you will so all our phones and tablet, as well as laptops can access the Iridium system.
So we can make calls, send and receive email ( no big attachments please ), download GRIB files for weather forecasts and we can send and receive SMS texts, and importantly friends and family can text us at no cost.
Details below.
Our Satphone number is 881622403801 voice calls are possible but can be quite expensive, 
Our email for the Iridium system is darktarn@myiridium.net
To send us an SMS text message go to http://messaging.iridium.com and enter our Satphone number
Alternatively and easier send SMS as e-mail to 881622403801@msg.iridium.com
Remember you are limited to 160 characters in the body of the message but you can send as many as you like, neither of these methods involve a cost to you to send apart from whatever your provider charges for texts and emails ( normally free these days )
Feel free to test the system by sending us a text or email and we will reply to confirm it has worked. SMS messages remain on the Iridium system for 24 hours so if we haven't picked them up in that time just send them again.
Hopefully we will be heading down river on Friday after sitting out gale force winds for the last couple of days.


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