I would also be interested in hearing about any
cheap service-plans available for
Iridium. The best we've seen lately was 500 minutes that lasts 1 year for ~$700 - EVERY year. Ouch! That's $2/day whether you use it or not!
One big
radio decision is Ham or
Marine SSB. If you go Ham, the
email (Winlink.org) is free, & there is a large community that will patch you into the phone system (or get a doctor on the line) if you want. The maritime mobile nets run pretty much all the time. For
Marine SSB you'll need SailMail, which is non-profit but still costs $250-300/year now.
But now that they've gotten rid of the Morse code requirements, getting a Ham
license is pretty easy, & it's free in the US. (OK, I'm a geek & fairly radio-active, so maybe "easy" is relative
)
I will grant that Sat-Phones are easier to install & use, & that it can download big datasets. If you're trying to dodge a tropical storm, it would be nice to have
internet access, no matter what it costs. But we can get pretty big GRIBs with WinLink, as well as text info on a storm's location & predicted track.
But it was the running costs that got to us. We wanted a long-term solution. We started with
both an Iridium
satellite phone & a Ham rig (see description
here, as well as radio
email info). For a while we could get plans with 200 minutes that lasted a year & cost $300, but instead of getting cheaper, those costs
more than doubled when Iridium dropped that
service plan. Since we got the sat-phone mainly so folks could contact
us (& few ever wanted to pay that much) we eventually dropped the
service.
Other
communications options to consider:
3G modems work within ~15nm of a cell tower, which is much of the world we
cruise in. They don't
work on passage (which is only 7% of the time for us) but they provide good
internet while coastal hopping, even through
remote areas of
Indonesia. I'm writing this while 3G connected in
Thailand. Friends were sailing down the coast of
Africa in thick
fog & wanted to make a tricky landfall, but didn't want to risk it in
fog. So they powered up their 3G
modem, dialed into the web-cams at
TheHeads.co.za, saw no fog on the coast so turned in & made a successful landfall. More info on 3G is available on our Cruising Info pages
here.
BTW, don't go with
GlobalStar. Their satellites can't talk to each other, so the
satellite you're talking to has to see a ground station itself. They work further offshore than 3G modems, but not enough to warrant the expense.