Being a techy I was quite excited, to see what has happened to Sat Comms in the last couple of years.

Starlink:

I have installed Starlink in a couple of locations and the speeds are amazing. However, in the lead up to the event they were moving the goal posts in terms of Costs and which equipment was going to work offshore. Give it another year and the world of offshore Sailing will have “cheap” 300mb Internet. At the moment 250Gb of Data is about 500 pounds a month offshore.

Iridium:

True anywhere signal but oh my its expensive! And slow like 1997 slow.  In 1997 i had a 56kb Modem for my PC, which would have been nearly 3 times faster than this. There was wifi hotspot  for this technology called Iridium go, but this was ruled out as it didn’t comply with the offshore rules– So I ruled this out.

Iridium Certus and the Go Exec!

Launched in March this promises 80KB (note the capitalisation  of the B = Bytes not b= bits ( 8 bits in a byte). It also has 2 telephone numbers which can run at the same time and  a built in speakerphone!.  Now this seems like a quantum leap in technology and it is! The downside the cost 125MB is the best part of £300 for a month ( with 2 hours of calls on top). This is akin to early 2000’s  internet at home, but it is useable for things like WhatsApp email grib files ( weather maps) etc.

So this is the way we went full review at the end of the trip but after day 3 I have used 12mb already.

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