My first little passage is now showing on the tracker map.

Thanks for sharing that. It 's interesting that it doesn 't show the exact route, only way points along the way. So it can 't be used for sharing tracks.

Vice Commodore, OCC 

[quote="DariaBlackwell" post=1712]Thanks for sharing that. It 's interesting that it doesn 't show the exact route, only way points along the way. So it can 't be used for sharing tracks.[/quote]

I 'd set the reporting interval to one hour, which is PredictWind 's recommendation, so as not to overload the map (and so as not to cost me too much money, since I 'm not yet on one of the "unlimited" plans). In fact, the interval can be set to anything from five minutes to a week. If I were on a short offshore passage, I might well choose four hours, and for an ocean passage, I might well choose twenty four hours, at the noon position; but I agree, if I were wanting to pass on info on a tricky passage cluttered with obstacles, I could use five or ten minutes. But this isn 't a track that can be exported, so is of limited use to others.

Daria,

We purchased an IridumGo Marine package from PredictWind with the $125 unlimited data package.

It does all that is says in the blurb. Yes it is easy to install, well not so easy on a steel boat as we had numorous holes to drill, but it all went smoothly. The unit itself has to be able to "see" the sky as it has the GPS built in it. So we mounted this under our steel dodger right near a glass window. It works fine there, though it does require a bit of shade as it overheats in the intense sunshine here in the Indian Ocean. The external antenna is mounted on the Davits.

We use it for weather, with PredictWind and also for Sailmail weather, though it is much slower pulling down grib files than via Sailmail . Email and short message via the Go is free, it works fine, but the replies are short as the allowed 160 characters include the reply email or phone number for the short messages.

The hourly tracking reporting is great, it is displayed at the top of our blog www.svcrystalblues.blogspot.com

The unlimited data is necessary as it is a very slow link. You must have a lot of patience and learn how to use Opera Mini, the web browser for the Go. It helps to have a lot of time to play with the go and passage making allows that. So far I have been able to
Send a FB message and image
Upload text and image to our blog
Browse FaceBook and make comments
Open gmail and read emails and reply
Read BBC, the Age and other news sites

It comes with 5 minutes of airtime, which we forgot to use in our first month.

For us it is the perfect com tool for crossing oceans with.

Hi Daria,

The DeLorme inReach might be worth considering as a lower-cost tracking and text message comms option, suited to taking into the liferaft, in case the on-board HF/SSB radio is not functioning (eg: problem with power supply) and for adventures ashore. Flexible subscription plans.

Anyone checked this already? See:

http://www.inreachdelorme.com/product-info/inreach-explorer.php

We used a combination of Delorme and Iridium Go on a recent land based expedition but,strangely, texts between to two devices were rather unreliable. The Delorme has two way messaging built in. So why Delorme wouldn 't talk to GO is unclear.

We had no problems recieving or sending email / sms via GO and of course it is free to send web based SMS from the Iridium web site which is a huge bonus.

Thanks Simon, Very useful comparison.

Did you contact DeLorne or Iridium about the problem and did they provide any solutions?

Did you send any messages to other people with the inReach and was that successful getting messages back and forth?

Have you tried the tracking feature of the inReach?

I have been considering one of these as a supplement to my own DSC HF/SSB radio setup, for trips ashore and as a backup.

I 'm having problems with the Iridium GO software. The mail and web part of it has taken to crashing when I download and open some, but not all, emails. I 've got tystie34@gmail.com set to forward to tystie@myiridium.net and I think, but am not sure, that this is where the problem lies. Also, the text editor misbehaves when I write a long email, in reply to another long email; it can 't cope after I 've filled a page. And I haven 't yet had the patience to wait long enough to open a web page! I 'm not impressed. I think this is a poorly-written and incompletely tested piece of software. When I 'm away from terrestrial internet, it 's better than nothing, but not as good as it ought to be.

Once more I 've had to complain to PredictWind about this woefully defective Iridium GO software. This time, it’s the tracking. Over the past week or so, I’ve been making my way along the channels inside Vancouver Island, and now I’ve reached Port McNeill. I have terrestrial internet for a day, and can look at my tracker map. It’s showing some crazy back-trackings that I didn’t do. You can see what I mean at http://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Tystie. I’ve been coming to anchor for the night, and setting the tracker to ‘no update’, then setting it to a suitable time interval when I got under way again. What seems to be happening is that when I start the tracker again, the first position report it sends is one that should have been sent during the last period I was under way and tracking, but wasn’t.

This is the reply I received from PredictWind Support:

The Iridium GO! uses an internal GPS (no option for external antenna), and we have noticed GPS spikes (inaccuracies) in the data. In addition the GPS reports sometimes get delivered out of order. In order to fix this issue we apply a filter on the data to help eliminate the GPS spikes on the tracking page. However the GPS tracking reports do not have a date/time stamp so getting a filter to work 100% of the time is challenging. We have alerted Iridium of this issue and look forward to fixes in future firmware upgrades. In the meantime it would help if you leave the GPS tracking on continuously, so the filter we have developed has a better chance of success. You can delete your previous track if you want, by logging into your account and going to the GPS tracking, and selecting "delete all data".

When I had the YellowBrick, the position reports did have a date/time/course/speed stamp, so I have to conclude that the Iridium GO is not as advanced a piece of hardware/firmware as the YellowBrick.