E final frontier in communications
Satellite communications have changed the extent to which we can stay in touch and weather route when o shore. Sam Fortescue looks at the latest options
atellite communications are no longer simply the last resort in an o shore emergency. In our hyper-connected existence, they are increasingly a comfort that we can’t do without when sailing far from land. From the thoroughly modern-day luxuries of posting to social media or sending a video clip, to con dence-inducing measures such as downloading the latest weather data wherever you are, sat comms are ubiquitous for bluewater cruisers and racers alike.
e technology required varies according to what you want to do with it, as does the cost of staying connected. It’s all a question of bandwidth. e good news is that prices are falling on the back of major investment by key players like Iridium and Inmarsat, and thanks to competition from terrestrial satcomms providers, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink and the UK’s OneWeb. Airtime is getting cheaper, and so is the hardware that uses it.
Iridium’s NEXT generation of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites is a case in point. Comprising 75 new satellites, the constellation was completed in 2019 a er eight launches. Dan Rooney at Iridium described it as the biggest tech refresh in history: “We migrated all of our previous users onto the new satellites with no downtime.”
e new satellites have enabled Iridium to roll out the Certus data service, using lighter, cheaper ‘user terminals’, as the antenna and black box receiver is called. Certus 100 is the entry-level service, and the most appealing for sailing users with a download speed of up to 88kbps (previous generations of the Iridium handset could manage no more than 2.4kbps).
It requires just a tiny rail-mounted antenna and a black box built by Blue Sky Network (with support from Mailasail’s Ed Wildgoose). With a maximum consumption of 18W, the system is low power and can even be tted with a SIM card to take advantage of fast mobile networks when in range. With a price tag of £2,999, it is not much more expensive than the slower handset devices.