Cruiser replied:

Tim,
Whilst I agree that Radtel should be more careful about the contents of their brochure, I think you might be a bit hard on them.
HF radio transmission is notoriously unreliable at night - a by-product of the frequency spectrum it operates in. Under certain conditions it can also be very patchy in the daytime, so expecting it to perform the same as a normal telephone netwok is just not realistic. Similarly, if there are a lot of people trying to make calls, there can be no guarantee of connection - there are not enough frequencies to go around.

tim replied:

cruiser,thankyou for your reply perhaps i was a bit hard on radtel as you say,i am dissapointed that the servive seems not to be what is promoted.tim

Nigel replied:

I can see how someone who is unfamiliar with HF could feel they have been misled by the claims in question. I took the claims to be about their equipment, not about the HF spectrum, as I understand that no one can claim to provide 100% service via HF without having unlimited channels right across the HF frequency range.

If you require 100% guaranteed phone connection at any time of the day or night then you will have to pay the extra cost and get a LEO satphone.

The RFDS have lower frequency channels for use at night that should give better night coverage than any of the radphone networks.

That said it depends on many factors, as I have been able to talk to melbourne from cairns at midnight on 8 megs quite clearly. It's all a matter of using the correct frequency for the time and location.

Kiwoka replied:

Tim, as you have found HF is not the be-all and end-all that everyone would like us to believe. However there is an alternative. Vodafone now have a service called "Globalstar", This is a Satphone service which does guarentee 100% coverage in OZ out to 200 nmiles off the coast.
The equipment is much cheaper than HF (Max $2000 as low as $0). however the calls are billed at a high rate.

I beleive this is a much cheaper and more reliable service than HF. Yes there are ongoing cost but so does HF and the advantages of 100% coverage is imperative to us.