Iridium Axcesspoint

[Nicost]

Hi everyone,

Im new here, not a sailor, but i often travel to remote areas of south america, and maybe you can help me with your experience with satellite comunications.

I have an old Kyocera Iridium phone and I recently upgraded to an Iridium 9575 Extreme with the Iridium Axcesspoint accesory.

I dont have it yet, but i've been surfing and doing some research. My @myiridium.net email from AxcessPoint Mail & Web is only accesible through an Iridium internet connection which is very slow and consumes expensive airtime. So people suggests to have a gmail (or any other) account to forward the emails automatically to the @myiridium.net so that i can check the incoming email through regular internet too.

AxcessPoint Mail & Web has an option to send you a sms when an email arrived.
This way you dont spend expensive airtime on a data call to check for emails you dont have. But this SMS cost money, and they are not cheap.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but every Iridium user has an email associated to their phone number which is phonenumber@msg.iridium.com and allows you to send free emails to your phone no more than 120 character long.

Then, instead of enabling the sms email alert which costs some airtime, could I configure my gmail account to forward the emails to @myiridium.net email and also to phonenumber@msg.iridium.com too? This way I'll get an incomplete email on the phone, but i'll know I have a new email for free ...

But im not sure of this, so thats why i ask for your help.
Is this email alert configuration possible and is it really free?
If its really free, then is there a limit to the free 120 characters emails you can send to your phone?

Thank you,

Regards,
Nicolas

[rebel heart]

Good idea. I emailed my iridum guy earlier asking about SMS rates in general and he replied:

incoming are free. Outgoing would cost 20secs of time.

So yeah, theoretically it might work. You could also have google voice sending very partial transcriptions of voicemails too. I hope Iridium doesn't read this : /

[avb3]

Originally Posted by rebel heart

Good idea. I emailed my iridum guy earlier asking about SMS rates in general and he replied:



So yeah, theoretically it might work. You could also have google voice sending very partial transcriptions of voicemails too. I hope Iridium doesn't read this : /

You might want to take a look at the iridium inreach product. The cool part is that you can use it with your smartphone or tablet.

[Paul Elliott]

With the XGate (or OCENS) email service, you can configure the system to send an SMS message automatically when an email has been received. When you have a regular internet connection you can also access your satphone email account via a web interface, so you don't need to burn satphone airtime.

[Paul Elliott]

There is a good write-up on the AxcessPoint in today's Panbo (an excellent marine electronics blog).