SSB, sat phone or nothing for East Coast Australia

[hyamsbeach]

I sailed to Whitsundays from Jervis Bay up to 50 miles off the coast and my crew found that Telstra worked fine except for one shadow spot around Mackay Qld.
Optus and Vodaphone were not as good.

[Simi 60]

Originally Posted by 44'cruisingcat

Boost uses Telstra's network (is actually part of Telstra).

They've got some pretty good data plans at the moment. 35Gb for $30.

Not bad but not as good as the kogan/voda 40gb for $0.99c deal.
Grabbed a couple of sims to get into a KAP frenzy with while in an area with coverage


https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/416636

[goodoldwoody]

Originally Posted by fursoc

Hi, just wondering if I can safely go up the East Coast of Australia without an SSB and sat phone.

That is, will an epirb, VHF and mobile phone do the job?

Thanks!

Hi

VHF is a must. GPS is essential north of Gt Sandy Straight. Mobile phone works with Telstra on & off all the way to Cairns, north of Cairns forget it. Coastal Stations north of Brisbane seem to work a bit odd (slack). You can get the BOM weather on iPad or phone if you're close enough to pretty much any town. We've had mobile whenever we wanted it! If you get a HF receiver you can get weather fax from BOM. See them on App Store etc. And also BOM voice weather forecasts from Charlieville. Otherwise call up coastal stations for weather or anything.
Enjoy it all.
PS in Queensland waters you may need to have a powerboat licence, even for a yacht that has an engine of more than 4.5kW. (That may apply to VIC., Tas, too but not NSW).
Good idea to pickup copies of Alan Lucas books.

Cheers Woody

[hzcruiser]

Originally Posted by Simi 60

Worth getting both optus/jennee sim and telstra/aldi sim
We found sometimes that jennee would work where aldi did not and vice versa.

I was wondering if an Aldi SIM would give me the same coverage after I tried them for a few months and had more outages than before (on Vodafone). And then I found the missing link, so to speak:



https://www.aldimobile.com.au/faq/#collapse-three

ALDImobile uses part of Telstra’s 4G and 3G mobile network


This might be the same for other retailers that don't have their own network.


In the end though, it might be more cost-effective to have one Telstra card than combining two reseller plans.