"Darryl Ramm" wrote in message
...
On May 3, 4:09 am, wrote:
On May 2, 9:45 pm, JS wrote:

For the Great Basin, a prepaid sat phone, or spot.
There are large areas with absolutely no coverage of Analog, CDMA, 3G,
GSM, you name it.
Jim

I'd be interested in the product number of one or two
satellite phone vendors whose phone has been used
successfully in the Great Basin.

Thanks.

Doug Whitehead

There is only one that has reliable USA coverage. That's Iridium. They
have one mobile phone the Motorola 9505A. ~$1.5k for the handset. The
outbound call costs are not horrendously expensive for what you get,
$1 to $2 per minute, the rip off is the calls inbound to the phone.
If you don't know what is going on it can be $5 to ~ $8 per minute.
Forget trying to use it in flight, you'll never be able to extend the
long helical antenna to use the phone (or even answer a call). If you
wanted to do that you could install a remote antenna (but then the
phone is not going to go with you if you bail out). And good luck
trying to find out exactly what the inbound charges are. This can be
avoided by a more complex call sequence to a USA call center vs.
direct dialing the phone on the Iridium "country" code. Still this is
the way to go and I think can be well worth it for people in remote
areas. Iridium and similar providers were forced by the feds to
implement a 911 service (same regulations affecting cable phone
companies etc.). Amusingly they are explicit they don't want to handle
aviation related incidents/in-air emergencies, hey but after a crash
your just an injured/stranded hiker anyhow.. I did all this looking
and was close to buying one for use when touring around the Great
Basin but I got busy/sidetracked and never did it.

Disqualified candidates are GlobalStar because of their current
problems with S-Band amplifiers on their satellites resulting in very
poor call reliability. This is a well known/discussed problem and
GlobalStar are launching new satellites. Note: this does not affect
the SPOT satelite messengers that only use the GlobalStar L-band
simplex amplifiers.

Other satellite providers either don't cover the USA or don't target
the mobile handset market (e.g. Inmarsat, although they are talking
about USA expansion).

Darryl

Would inbound calls actually be an issue? I'd imagine most folks would keep
it turned off to concerve the battery and use only in an emergency for a
short outbound call that provides the crew with GPS coordinates and the
pilots situation. Maybe some would arrange with the crew to turn it for a
few minutes on the hour to receive inbound calls after an emergency outbound
call was made. Anyway, whether it's $1 or $8 per minute, it's still cheap
if you are down in the great basin and need help.

Spot would be the ticket for tracking and the occasional "I'm OK" message.

Wow, what progress from the time 40 years ago when pilots launched into the
desert with only a pocket full of quarters to use in a pay phone they hoped
to find - which reminds me of a story from that era.

A pilot lands near a desert town and walks in only to find it a deserted
'ghost town'. Walking down the dusty main street he spies an old fashioned
wooden phone booth with a crank telephone inside. Expecting nothing, he
puts the earpiece to his head and turns the crank.

"Hello? Who are you? was the incredulous response. It seems that an old
and forgotten equipment panel in a Pacific Bell switching center had rung
and a technician had picked up the call. It was hard to tell if the
technician was more surprised by the pilots story or the fact that a 50 year
old plug panel still worked.

Bill D