Ham and SSB have their own advantages; another topic entirely. Also, my answer is very wrapped around my job so my
gear is a little fancier than most; if I had to pay for this stuff myself I wouldn't have half of it.
I have a world data plan on a quad band
phone so that handles anything in cell range. Outside of that, I use an
Iridium 9555 almost every day for talking to my office.
I wrote a small (like ridiculously small)
software application that downloads weather
charts in chunks, because sat phone downloads are notoriously slow and buggy. I keep my links like this:
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/fax/PJBA99.gif
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/fax/PKFA88.gif
, then the little app just buzzes through and downloads them with
compression. Works for me.