Ugh - the joys of satellite data

OK the below post SHOULD have been the first post to be submitted over the sat phone, but in truth, it didn't work properly. I am experiencing a problem where the connection will just stop transmitting data after 20-45 seconds. I have tried changing so many elements to try and figure this out but to no avail.
I've emailed the MailASail support guy Ed who although it's totally not his job, he may be able to point me in the right direction. I've made around 30 minutes of calls this month alone, I'd say at least half of them are data calls - all seemingly a waste diagnosing this problem.
What kept me awake last night is that perhaps these data calls (to an international number) are charged at satellite rate, plus international call rate. So instead of my anticipated bill of $90-$100 it may be more like $270-300. I guess we'll see, but I am anxiously waiting a Telstra bill.

It seems cheap to be concerned with the cost, but I'd say that post below would have cost about $5 to submit over satellite in airtime charges. You guys had better enjoy our posts! The picture is super small and super compressed. It's about 15kb, or 45 seconds of airtime to upload! I won't win any quality awards for the pics, but it should be a nice little bit of bling to an otherwise text based post. When we get into towns, we'll be using WiFi which will enable us to upload much nicer photos and even video.

On another note, I came up with an awesome idea. Using the Spot messenger, it is setup to email and SMS family and friends once we submit an 'I'm OK' message. In an epic brain explosion, it occurred to me to put in the email address we will use for submitting blog posts. That way, we can post our position each day, for virtually no money, and without doing anything other then sending the message. It's a two minute ordeal to send a spot message or 30+ minutes to figure out out location, prepare a blog post and upload it over satellite data. The sum of all this, you can be assured an update every day. My next post I'll send through a spot message to see how it looks as a blog post. This also gets around the problem of how the SPOT website deletes your history after 7 days. It's epicly anoying, but at least this way we'll be able to keep the locations forever.

Just FYI, I modified the GPS location to cut down on stalkers... nothing personal.