Iridium Go-antenna localisation?

South Pacific Familyadventure 2008
Claes Brodin
Tue 10 Nov 2015 16:40
On our former boat Tarita , we had a Sailor SC 4400 satellite telephone. We mainly used it for e-mail and gribfiles while out at sea, but sometimes also for longdistance phonecalls while being far out at sea. Tarita was also equipped with a SSB-radio which we found very useful for ship to ship communication. Nevertheless we found the satellite Telephone far more convenient for e-mail/grib files and the cost of around 1,3 Euro/minute we found reasonable(about 30 Seconds for a grib-file).
Dora Mac is also equipedd with an Icom SSB-radio (and a Pactor modem for e-mail) but having such good experiences with sat. phone (and the Iridium network which proved to be more reliable than Inmarsat on the Pacific Ocean), we opted for a Iridium Go devise. To place the outer antenna is crusial and placing it on the rail of the flybridge did not give sufficient signalstrength. Instead I tried hoisting up to the spreaders which gave a lot better signal.

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