Iridium Phones
Neria Fjord, Greenland
61 degrees N 48 degrees W

by Kate and Hamish Laird

• Planned route this summer: Maine, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Greenland, Scotland
• On board: Kate and Hamish Laird, their children, Helen (4) and Anna (3), Jason Fitschen, and up to three guests on each leg of the voyage.

We are snug in an anchorage with four lines ashore, waiting for the wind to start blowing. There has been a low pressure system lurking over Labrador for days, and now it seems that it is about blow 45 knots – right from the direction we want to go.

Should we try to run for it today or wait three days until the blow is over?

A few months ago, I wrote in these pages how we liked using Sat C for our communications and said we didn't want to use an Iridium phone. May I eat my words?

When we had our layover in New Hampshire, I went to order up a Sat C for Seal. The Sat C we knew and loved had been replaced by the Mini C, and no one at Thrane and Thrane could tell us whether it would work in deep fjords in Greenland or Tierra del Fuego. And Svalbard didn't have any coverage at all. I started researching an Iridium phone, and discovered that for half the price I could have an Iridium system: basic communications were more expensive per day, but I could also send and receive pictures (for a price!). The coverage went as far north or south as we could possibly want to go, although sometimes steep-sided fjords close off the signal for a few minutes at a time.

I was convinced. Then I discovered that there wasn't good weatherfax coverage in Greenland, and that friends of ours had managed by picking up weather images via their Iridium phone.

I looked at several different suppliers of Iridium phones, but I didn't talk to anyone with any marine experience until I spoke to Victor at Satellite Phones Direct, Norcross GA http://www.satellite-phones-direct.com (1-888-684-3323). He pointed out that the antenna cable I would need to reach our cabin was horribly thick and unwieldy, and that they made up a short flexible whip to handle those last feet (and make it possible to hold the phone and talk on it, although we don't do that – we use it strictly for email.) I probably could have spliced it up for less than the $50 they were charging, but I had no idea what fittings I would need and we had only a month before we left for Greenland.

We ordered the phone with the marine antenna. As requested, they sent the phone to us right away, and the antenna as soon as they received it.

The same friends who told us about the Greenland weatherfax recommended UUPlus as an email provider, and we read glowing reports of it here in the SetSail communications reports. Done. The amazing thing about UUPlus is it can handle dropouts; I think we could get a faster baud through the Iridium direct link, but our regular software crashes whenever there is a dropout. Having a private UUPlus address also eliminates spam – my father receives all the email for Seal and from our website and handles all our charter contacts, and then he forwards emails to us on board.

So far, this system has worked perfectly. We had a cold shock when, days after arriving in Greenland, we discovered our particular Iridium phone had been recalled, but with a flurry of emails from Satellite Phones Direct, they arranged for a phone to be shipped to my parents, who were already planning to visit us in Greenland. The phone has arrived and we are now awaiting their arrival and a replacement, although we haven't had any problems (knock wood!) with our current phone. Satellite Phones Direct was also very helpful about steps we could take to avoid a problem with the current phone (never letting the battery run out and not trying to change the time/date feature) and emailed a software patch to correct the problem. (We would have to find an internet café to do that, which is easier said than done in Greenland – every town dweller we meet has email, but there are not very many public places to do email.)

I did find a slightly cheaper place to buy the phone, but they didn't always answer their phone, and they didn't know anything about the marine set up (or remote antennas in general), so I am definitely pleased with the service we received from Satellite Phones Direct. This is a completely disinterested recommendation: We paid for the phone and we're paying for the replacement (they are to refund our credit card when the old phone arrives back at their office).

UUPlus works well too – it doesn't seem to like my father's email address and at least three messages have gone astray, but the modem software is very good, which is especially important to us as we are often in deep-sided fjords with spotty satellite coverage.

But it is the weather that has really sold us on the system. We use it to receive GRIBs via email. (Keen Hams pick it up through SailMail; we've met yachts in Greenland who use that exclusively, and others who report terrible propagation problems. We don't have an SSB, so the question is moot for now.) Everyday in Greenland, we've picked up GRIB files and the text forecast in Danish off the web (UUPlus has a feature called “WebFetch” where it picks up a graphics-free version of any website while checking the regular email.) This has been sufficient 90% of the time, but there are times when we want more details. GRIBs are all very well and good, but we find the surface forecasts provided by a meteorologist are usually better – someone much better at weather interpretation than we are has had a look at it. In northwestern Greenland the best we found were the Danish charts, but now in the south we are able to get the US NOAA Atlantic charts, which are excellent.

Today, gathering all the weather info cost us about $20. Ouch. But we picked up the GRIBs, extended the GRIB range and picked it up again, gathered the Danish text forecast, the Danish 24-hour prognostic isobar chart, and then picked up the three huge NOAA charts – current surface from the Great Lakes to Greenland, and the 48- and 96-hour forecasts for the entire North Atlantic. It would have been considerably more to schedule a weather router forecast for the area, and in our experience, routing works best when you are a regular customer, rather than calling in for a one-off forecast.

The other advantage of using the Iridium with the WebFetch software is that we have complete control over when we want this information. If we were using a Ham-based system, we would have to have someone collect the information for us and then send it on. With the Iridium, today I can wake up and decide I need every bit of information available on the web; a week ago, I didn't even bother to collect the GRIBs. (It does require having spent several hours on the web in a café or at home, noting down the web addresses of all the sites one could possibly want while away at sea.)

Using the Internet does carry the risk that you'll download a huge weather chart and find it is yesterday's image. The other day I made that mistake picking up the Danish forecasts at five in the morning. I've since learned to download the small text forecast, and check the date and then calling again to pick up the isobar chart (a four-minute download.)

We've also used the phone to send drastically reduced pictures home to family and SetSail. By reducing the pictures to about 400 * 300 pixels and saving them at 20% quality, they are usually less than 20 KB per picture. UUPlus has a further compression software that seems to reduce the size of images during transmission.

We're convinced.

We're also convinced that we'll stay here for the next couple of days. After collecting the weather, we went out and reset the anchor and rigged four lines ashore. Now we'll just have to wait and see if all this weather data has made any difference to our forecasting abilities.

(This article would cost $51.88 to send on a Sat C … it will cost about $2 on the Iridium)

You can learn more about the Lairds and SEAL at their website www.expeditionsail.com.