IsatPhone - Any Experience ?

[avb3]

I'm not sure if this is a new offering or if it has been around for a while. Apparently rather then working of the near earth satellites that Imarsat does, they work of 3 geostationary satellites 22,000 miles away.

Wondering if anyone has real life experince with them. They seem to be far more cost effective.

[RTB]

We've been communicating with i2f (email only), via this unit. It seems solid. Maybe check with i2f once they are in port (3-4 days), and see what he can tell you.

Ralph

[Islander]

We've just bought one, not activated yet so nothing useful to tell you.

RTB, are you using their ATMOS email product or text to email feature?

Cheers
Paddy

[RTB]

That's a question for John. He and the Inmarsat are aboard Imagine a few hundred miles off the coast of Costa Rica. I'm sitting at my computer in San Antonio. We've been sending weather info to them, once they lost the ability to download gribs. Not sure where their problem lies.

Ralph

[Islander]

Worrying to hear they "lost the ability to download gribs" as this is one of the main reasons we bought it. Will you let us know if you find out what happened and how it was fixed?

Cheers

[RTB]

Will do, or i2f might be back on in a week or so.

Ralph

[imagine2frolic]

Sometimes we could get gribs, and sometimes not. Not all the bugs have been worked out yet. We too went with inmarsat for the weather info. Unfortunately we will miss the manager here in Costa Rica vacationing.

Phone call, and text messages were great, and helpful. Nothing beats seeing the weather with your own eyes though. Our SSB has failed to produce faxes. Beverly could get a job as the Cruiser girl's weather gal. She has done a great job feeing us information.......i2f

[RTB]

Originally Posted by imagine2frolic

Beverly could get a job as the Cruiser girl's weather gal. She has done a great job feeing us information.......i2f

I'll pass that on to her. It will make her day. Now, I have my own personal weather gal, thanks to what she has learned about gribs.

[Islander]

Thanks for the info - I'll be testing ours out over the next couple of weeks. If I find out any tricks I'll post them here, might be of help to you.

What are you using to get gribs? Ugrib or Zygrib?

Cheers

[avb3]

Originally Posted by imagine2frolic

Sometimes we could get gribs, and sometimes not. Not all the bugs have been worked out yet. We too went with inmarsat for the weather info. Unfortunately we will miss the manager here in Costa Rica vacationing.

Phone call, and text messages were great, and helpful. Nothing beats seeing the weather with your own eyes though. Our SSB has failed to produce faxes. Beverly could get a job as the Cruiser girl's weather gal. She has done a great job feeing us information.......i2f

Sorry to hear about the problems with sail and crew. I guess one can't be too careful.

When you say sometimes you could not get gribs, do you think this is a function of not connecting to the satellites or something else?

Seems that if you can text etc. with the unit, gribs should be accessible.

Would love to hear more detail if you have it.

[imagine2frolic]

The connection to satellites were good. We could do text, and make calls. The problem is they haven't worked out alll the bugs yet. They actually admitted this, and sent us NOAA reports a couple of times. They have their own grib program. Connecting to the net is time consuming, and expensive, very expensive.

It was frustrating, but I do think they worked their tail off for us. I am not giving up on them yet......i2f

[Islander]

I just went through the process of loading the USB drivers and failing to connect to the server. I've sent screen dumps and logfiles to the support staff, but it doesn't look good. I'll post again when I hear back.

Cheers

[Islander]

I've just been informed the Isatphone doesn't work with Windows 7. I've not been able to get it to work with Vista, either.

Cheers.

PS If anyone has got it working (reliably) can they post details here?