Iridium GO installation

[Chris777]

For those that have an Iridium GO, where do you have it installed? Navstation with external antenna, Cockpit with external antenna or just totally portable? Have one I am about to install on my HR 36 Mk II but unsure about the best location.

Any help/advice is much apreciated.

Chris

[kipwrite]

Mine works perfectly with the built in antenna, even below. Or sometimes I’ll place it under the dodger, but I don’t see much difference.. I see no need for the remote antenna.

[Chris777]

Kipwrite..... Thanks, good news.

[Unity]

I had the opposite experience. Very bad to impossible reception below. Ok under Bimini but the external antenna made a big difference in reliability. Ours is below deck at chart table with antenna on rail above the Bimini.

Still painfully slow to use, forget about web pages, but it does work everywhere for emails and weather.

[billknny]

Originally Posted by Unity

I had the opposite experience. Very bad to impossible reception below. Ok under Bimini but the external antenna made a big difference in reliability. Ours is below deck at chart table with antenna on rail above the Bimini.

Still painfully slow to use, forget about web pages, but it does work everywhere for emails and weather.

Second the comment about the external antenna, it really helps or nav station mount.

Iridium is not really intended nor is it suitable for any kind of web browsing. Maybe some very low bandwidth text only pages, but who makes those anymore? We use ours for our daily weather update through predictwind, and the occasional email.

It works well with the external antenna. It works on deck as a portable device. It works not at all below deck on our boat with its internal antenna.

[Chris777]

Thank you everyone for the coments. As we do have the external, we will get that installed to the nav station. Then if we want to bring it to the cockpit we can, but we can now be asurerd of a working un it below. Yes we only plan for weather and occasional email, tex/sms,

[Palarran]

Originally Posted by kipwrite

Mine works perfectly with the built in antenna, even below. Or sometimes I’ll place it under the dodger, but I don’t see much difference.. I see no need for the remote antenna.

+1 and no need to add anything extra. That's it

[arsenelupiga]

Originally Posted by Palarran

+1 and no need to add anything extra. That's it

you may want to rethink this one in south pacific where number of satellites less, especially 200 nm + from larger inhabited islands and add some bad weather in the mix.

I need 12 min on average to download 100 kb worth of weather with external antenna in SP. Not having 5 stars strong connection is actually useless. Happened once to have 4 only.

[Chris777]

Originally Posted by arsenelupiga

you may want to rethink this one in south pacific where number of satellites less, especially 200 nm + from larger inhabited islands and add some bad weather in the mix.

I need 12 min on average to download 100 kb worth of weather with external antenna in SP. Not having 5 stars strong connection is actually useless. Happened once to have 4 only.

Thank you, It will be a while before we hit the South Pac, Bahamas, Carib and Atl for now.

Cheers