Antennas.

[Mr. Sandman]

I have been looking at these (sat phones) for a couple years now....
Globalstar has been struggling with putting up new satellites for years...Most people I know who bought them gave up, threw them in the trash and went to iridium. If they ever get it fixed, they will have to give the phones away to re-attract the customer who is fed-up with them.

However, there is a newer alternative to consider...inmarsat . They use a different technology and from what I hear it sounds like it actually performs better than iridium in many cases. iridium works well but does drop calls from time to time.(but I like the design of irridum better) They use a lot of satellites, like 60, in a low orbit. inmarsat uses 3 sat's up very high that orbit around the equator. So this phone will not work very well if you are at the poles but in the lower lat's it works well as the sat's appear stationary because they are up so high (like 22000 mi.) They have very few dropped calls.

I will be getting either the inmarsat or the iridium this spring. I have not decided. I really only want it for the boat and so the plan is to get a charging cradle for it and get a plan that allows me to use it seasonally if I can. I think I will only use it a couple hundred minutes/year. The one nice thing about the inmarsat is that it has amazing battery life. I think they both do texting and can receive email/web stuff if you hook a computer to it but I only want to use it to make a few calls/texts when I am out of cell phone range or in an emergency.

I have used globalstar and the new iridium offshore. The iridium is way better but I would like to see an inmarsat before I buy anything. Inmarsat has very attractive pricing.

[piemma]

Actually I had an iridium phone when I was doing some classified work with the Service but we were using military sats for the comm and that's a whole different story. The iridium phones are the balls but they are expensive.