I used an Iridium Extreme on a recent
passage from St Marten and across the Pacific. Ours also had the Axcesspoint module which also allows you to send and receive emails which allows you to receive any of the
weather data through Sailmail which is quite extensive and the file size is small.
For
tracking our position we sent an SMS to a brilliant free website which had been developed by a CF
member but unfortunately he has now disabled it as he said it was not attracting much interest from the sailing community. This is such a shame as it posted your position on
Google Earth and you could also send a 160 character SMS along with your position report. It was called bluewatersailingdata.com and we were the first to use it on an
ocean crossing.
Maybe if enough people contacted him (his name is on the website) we could persuade him to bring it back. It may be worth opening a thread titled Bring Back Bluewatersailingdata.com but he is cruising at the moment so he may not be in a position to do so.