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Satellite Email via GPS?
mtm_king asks: "Has anyone had any experience with Magellan GSC 100 Satellite Communicator? It is a GPS that does email. (Their web site pricing and info is out of date.) The GSC costs $850 unit, $130 for case and antenna, another $50 in sign up fees, then it is $30 a month for the service. My parents live full time in Mexico (outside of Todo Santos, cool place) and just have a cell phone which is expensive and flaky ($1.00 a minute+ from the US) . Trying to communicating with them is really frustrating. I am thinking about buying one of these units for them,but it is getting close to some 'serious money' considering I do not know how well it works. I know I could try to get their PC on the internet through the cell phone but considering that they have to stand by a window or go outside to use it, and the cost of an ISP and more minutes on the cell phone...well, I am looking for cheaper/more reliable alternatives than that." Would the GSC really work better in this case than using the cell phone modem?
This looks great. But...
Wha about privacy? Do spammers get access to your most recent coordinates, too?
Can I also access the email from, say, an IMAP account? Where is the email stored?
Other than that, I want one.
I don't get the point. You want to buy a 1000$ unit just to email?! Uploading email just takes a few seconds so it can't be that expensive, can it?
History matters..
At least then you can use it as a phone as well. Also you can sort of send text messages to the phone as well, but not the other way round.
Expensive initially, but has more uses.
Phil
can a place without phone service or Internet access really be?
Face it, buster, your parents are 'square'!
Can you output the data to a computer/PDA? If so it would be pretty trivial to tunnel just about anything through email. $30/month for unlimited internet access is pretty cool, even if it is dirt slow.
Short Message Service messaging is cheap (if not outright free), reliable and compatible with email. Most new phones allow you to send SMS messages to email addresses and not just phone numbers, while you can use the phone companies email to SMS gateways to send email to the handset. Sure there is a character limit (about 250 chars) but for decades people did more with much, much less ("Thnk tlgrph. Stp."). Worst case, send a few messages.
Hope the suggestion helps.
_____________ Blah, blah, this is my sig, yackyty shmakity
A iridium phone costs (after hidious federal taxes) between $1000 and $1800 depending on model. Their cheapy plan, cost $20 per month for service and $1.50 per min - they have a cradel for $150 that makes the thing behave like a slow serial modem. With a good ISP, it you get 4800 baud. They give you a Windows CD that you can use that will compress the stream and use their ISP. I threw it away - and just use SSH for it's compression on a BSD laptop.
The cool thing - is that most plans charge by ten second increments. Volume plans can get you down to $.60 a min.
Also they work greay in an emergency - I had no trouble getting a line on Sep11, but cell and land line diden't work.
Curious thing though - after Sep11 (around the 25th or so) - Iridium calls took an extra five seconds to connect. I think shady people were being monitered by our frinds at the NSA. Or I could just need to re-adjust my foil hat.
Sorry 'bout the rambeling. I need coffee.
Oh - the best thing about Iridium VS Garmond: You family can use it in an emergency, when communiction is a life saver and not just a novilty for email.
Good luck - sounds like a cool project and I admire you for trying to keep in touch with family.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
He just copied the web page without any attribution.
It's a crime.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
An email sender must first find a satellite than will pass above you in the next 36 hours (IIRC) and send it the message. When the satellite passes above you, if your unit is on it squirts the data down. Otherwise it's lost. You need a separate program to compute satellite passes and there's no inter-satellite communication. Long delays. It's so complex, there's no way Joe Schmuck can send you an email.
From a moving unit to a ground based station is a little easier: keep your unit on until a satellite passes overhead, that's all.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
GPS Satellites do not carry any extraneous information, such as data streams to carry e-mail, etc. If Magellan's unit provides communicaion abilities, it will be with other similar units, or through a 3rd party provider, such as a cellular phone company, the latter being more probable. If they are using a 3rd party provider, does their provider extend their service into Mexico?
I know there are several projects to extend the reach of the internet into technologically dead areas of the world. And while I don't know all of the details, I know there has been an effort to use HAM radio as a transmission medium to connect computers in areas where they have poor or no communication infrastructure. Perhaps a better 'Ask Slashdot' would be to pose the question of how to connect when there are no local ISPs.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
Are they living in a boat? Great surfing at Todos, although I haven't been there in about 6 years.
See a recient ./ question about starband. Seems like the costs are only slightly more, but you get a true internet connection, and it has been around longer.