Communication Ideas

Morning - It's my birthday today and the opportunity has come up to look into potential gifts. So this is an excuse to go wild and post and article about the type of technology we plan to take.

A brilliant idea that I hope to include is a SPOT Satellite Messenger. http://www.findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=102
It's a one way communication device that allows you to send the below messages with the press of a button.
The new unit has four basic messages.

911/Emergency - Sends a message to an international emergency department, which coordinates and dispatches local emergency authorities to your location. It continually does this until the batteries run flat. This also informs your contact group which may help if for some reason your 911 call goes unanswered in a certain country - allowing your contact group to coordinate a rescue.

I'm OK - Sends a message to your pre-defined contact group that you are OK and your GPS location so that your friends and family can locate you on Google maps.

Help - Sends a message to your pre-defined contact group informing them that you need non-urgent assistance. For example, I'm bogged, I'm broken down etc. Again giving your contacts your GPS location and visual indication on Google maps.

Track - A facility that allows a stream of messages at roughly 10 minute intervals to be tracked and plotted on Google maps. Probably not a bad idea if you were bushwalking and were not aware when you might become disabled or fall, or become ill - without triggering your SPOT personally. The intent is for people to track your adventure, but I see it more as an 'un-attended tracking in case something goes wrong'. I guess it would be important that your contacts were aware of this prior to you going out - so that IF you didn't come back with an 'I'm OK' after your adventure, they would assume your last location was your last tracking location.

Custom Message - This isn't an interactive SMS type service, but more of a pre-defined message you may often want to send. For example 'I'm stuck in traffic, I'm running late' could be triggered by this button and gets sent to your contact group.

As always with these posts - Click on the pictures to see a larger size one. Above I have pictures of the messenger, and the coverage maps.

OK so that's the spot messenger, but we plan to carry a Satellite phone, on the Iridium network which should give us excellent coverage 24/7 as compared to the laughable 10 minute window every hour or so that you get using the Globalstar network. Play with this tool here to see the Globalstar network shortfalls. Try keying in somewhere in Mongolia. Even keying in Canberra sees similar results. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but that does seem to make it a bit unreliable.

The Iridium network has this to say "According to the Frost & Sullivan report (an independent report) over 99% of calls are successfully connected and completed without being disconnected. Iridium has more satellites than any other commercial constellation, and they are constantly in view of every part of the Earth. With no service gaps, Iridium users should be able to pick up and hold a strong communications signal, allowing them to place or receive calls just about anywhere as long as there is a direct line of sight to the sky." - That's the sort of confidence we want.

You can imagine we intend to document this trip whilst we are on the road and are pretty much assuming there will be absolutely zero WiFi or 3G for 90% of the trip. We will try to use satellite data which has a whopping 2.4kbps speed. For those of you that are too young to remember dialup, that should be just less than 17KB/minute. They say that using a specific kind of data service can get you up to 9600bps or 70KB/minute In the interest of saving our patience and money we're intending to post our blog articles via raw text based email. We intend to write the articles, edit and spell check them with an email client like outlook, and email them straight to our blog using a special email address. This should save us a heap compared to writing these online. Even this post has taken more than an hour. Even best case writing the blog offline, then logging into blogger.com and posting would take us 15 minutes at this speed. Which makes for a very expensive post at roughly $3/Minute. So all going to plan, we've budgeted $5/day satellite phone/data usage. We imagine a once a week call home to keep our sanity - but look forward to text based emails from family.