satellite phones

G'day Ray. Sat Phones..........Jee, I can tell you about my Globalstar, after my last trip i contacted gs and cancelled my contract....they broke the contract not me...by charging me for a service they could not provide. I wont go on about the frustration of owning a gs but I will say this.....If something had gone wrong on our last trip and we needed urgent aid and had no service....someone from gs would have been accountable. Yes we do have uhf, cdma and epirb, thats beside the point.
I am now fitting up HF.

Cheers...........BIGDOG

We sell both Globalstar and Iridium and hire Iridium. GS aren't worth a pinch of $hit in my opinion.

Never have a problem with any of our hired Iridium sat phones. I even take them on trips with me - last one was 3 weeks in Cape York about 2 months ago.

Useage of the hired units is high with most monthly bills being between $500 and $1000 a month and we get no complaints. In our brach we have around 5 and they are on hire 95% of the time (land based).

My 2 cents...

Regards
David

Highly recommend the Iridium system as they have the best satellite coverage. There have been a lot of bad comment in this forum about Globalstar coverage.

I use a U.S. provider SatCom Direct for my Iridium service but I think it is available from Telstra.

Dick

We use he Optus Mobilesat service, never had a problem, works anywhere.

Cheap phone calls.

We can even use our cordless phone on it and that gives us coverage in hotel rooms, in the camper trailer or if out walking about 400m range from the vehicle.

Regards Richard

Do an archive search of this site for "Motorola 9500" and "Motorola 9505". If you buy one of these outright (second hand) you won't need to sign up for a contract. All you'll need is a regular mobile service with Telstra with interational roam enabled. We've got a 9500, it cost about $1,000 not a cent since and it's never let us down. The call rates are high, but we only use it for emergencies so we don't care.

Thank you all for your imput . I now know what to look for and what questions to ask
Thanks again Ray