Observations of an Iridium Go after first time use during a passage

[piebuss]

Originally Posted by fxykty

You’ll be mostly just fine with the built-in antenna, though you may need to place the GO in a position where it can see the sky (windows are fine, as is canvas, foam core fibreglass so-so) that won’t be near a powerpoint for the relatively short power cord.

Have you also been playing with the GO, independently (for calls/sms/email) and together with PW (downloading weather and routing and uploading position in PWO) as well as trying out PW? If not, activate your SIM now and start doing that.

Where’s your delivery trip from/to? If heading back to NZ then I really recommend you consider using MetBob for routing. We used him on our recent passage from NZ to AUS and he differed several times quite significantly from the majority of the PW routes. Those last 300 miles towards Cape Reinga can be brutal if you don’t set up properly for potential SW or SE winds, or strong E or NE winds along the coast of Northland.

I activated our Sim and made a few calls, sent and received some text messages and emails. All seemed to work perfectly over the iridium with the apps on my phone and the new tablet.

I agree, Bob is great. He's provided support on a few deliveries I've done over the years, and I'll ask him to help us again for this one.

[Palarran]

Originally Posted by Palarran

Nice review and I can echo all the good complements for the Iridium Go. I've had two for two Atlantic crossings and they have worked great for a low cost.

The real reason to add my .02 here is that if anyone is looking to buy one, mine is for sale. Used two months, bought in March from Predictwind. $450 plus shipping. I think all you need to do is buy the $10 sim card from PW and subscribe to their service.

As an FYI I did sell mine to a member here. Thank you flyboyscd.

[johnjuliano]

(As an aside, is it possible to use the Iridium Go with a regular network router so that you don't have to swap WiFi networks to use it?)

No. The Iridium will not connect to router – old firmware,

However, we use the Iridium Go as a router, though support people tell us it is expressly not supported.

I have not been able to find out whose router software Iridium uses or what the device count limit it. We’ve had eight devices connected without problem.

[ewsponberg]

What is everyone’s experience using the email function on the Iridium GO Mail app? We bought the GO from PredictWind back in March 2022 before we left from Darwin, Australia to Bali in Indonesia. We have the Unlimited plan. Weather predictions worked great, but more often than not the weather did not read those memos and behaved quite differently.

As for the email app, we have had two serious problems. The first was that I could not send emails from my iPhone or iPad Iridium GO email accounts to mine and my wife’s personal email accounts at DreamHost. With a lot of urging by PredictWind on our behalf, they finally got Iridium to address the problem which was that DreamHost did not recognize @myiridium.net as a valid domain. So we had to get DreamHost to specifically add @myiridium.net as a valid and recognizable domain name. Then the emails worked.

The other problem we have is that the REPLY function in the GO Mail app does not work well. That is to say, it works, but it does not save the text of what you reply in the body of the sent email. Oh, the first line of the text shows up in the SENT mail folder where you see all your sent emails, but when you open an email that you have REPLYd to, the text is not there! The text of what you are responding to is there but not what you have written. And the text of what you have written shows up in the email when it gets to the other end. But, frustratingly, the text of what you have written in your reply does not appear in the saved email. The work around is to not use the REPLY function, just create a new email every time—new emails get saved properly. But you can easily lose the context of the discussion thread.

So, does anyone else have this problem? I also find the mail app frustratingly slow and cumbersome to use. You have to go though a slow CONNECT process every time you want to send/receive emails through the GO Mail app. I would be interested in hearing your experiences.

Cheers,
Eric Sponberg
SY Corroboree
Currently in Bali, Indonesia