Our
boat came with an
ICOM M700 that was a piece of garbage, mostly because it was old and didn't
work well for digital modes such as
weather faxes. This summer we replaced it with an
ICOM IC-7200 (amateur HF) that plugs into a windows
laptop via USB. It works really well for NOAA weather fax, WINLINK (ham-radio email), and other digital modes. Can't legally use it to transmit on the
marine bands, but we find the amateur digital bands to be more useful.
Some people like SSB for the cruisers nets. We haven't gotten into those yet but the
Caribbean is well served by several nets that you can't get from a
satellite system. We also find the BBC, Voice of America, and
Radio Havana
Cuba to be entertaining on SSB.
That said, we're also going to get an IridiumGO for redundancy and communication with
family. While we can
email anyone with SSB, texting and calling friends is more straightforward with the
satellite system.
If you already have the system and it works, I think you might as well learn how to use it before you throw it out. At the very least it can serve as redundancy, which is never a bad thing. I agree that it can be finicky at times, but playing around for a couple hours will teach you a lot.