Wooooohoooooooooooo

Yep - you bet, it actually worked. Excuse my rambilings of all the lame technicial posts, but it's been playing on my mind trying to get this darn thing working. It's kind of important to us to figure out this problem as it represents the main way we'll be posting our blogs on the road. Thanks go to Ed from MailASail for his troubleshooting - I got it working on Cassie's old Dell laptop running WinXP. I'm now confident some Win7 component or background application was hogging all of our very limited 320 Bytes/second. I will revisit getting this working on our new laptop once we're on the next months billing cycle... I have no idea what all my testing has cost! So now the posting solution is pretty good, I thought I'd test the SMS functionality.
It sends SMS fine, but doesn't receive them. If I take the SIM out and put it in a normal GSM mobile, it works fine. I've checked the SMS message centre number and its fine. Now, this is how the plot thickens... If I get a notification from Telstra (like a voicemail or missed call) the SMS comes through. If I SMS from an online system to the handset, it gets through. Maybe it's just a Vodafone thing. I don't have any other carriers to test with... Wait, I haven't tried sending to itself.
Thinking about it though, it's not really necessary. I wanted this to work was to facilitate quick messages like 'happy birthday', or 'wish you were here'. But if it's urgent, a call will be best. If its not, an email will be best. SMS is just a kind of expensive middle ground. I have really nerdy videos of how the sat data connection works and the emails get out, but I doubt its going to see the light of day... Its equal or worse than the 'testing the sat phone' video.
And yes that post below is super random. It's just a random pic off Cassie's old laptop that I used to test how long it takes to upload a post via sat. Enjoy.