Great stuff! I'm starting to work a lot on the satellite space (https://www.sourcemeta.com), building a binary serialization format around JSON called JSON BinPack (https://jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com) that is extremely space-efficient to pack more documents in the same Iridium uplink/downlink operation (up to 74% more compact than Protocol Buffers. See reproducible benchmark here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12799).
It is still a heavy work in progress, but if anybody here is suffering from expensive Iridium bills, I would love to connect and discuss to make sure JSON BinPack is built the right way!
Hearing about Iridium reminded me of how excited I was to take on a job managing 5 engineers for them, until they offered me a base salary of $135,000 in Phoenix. They work on incredibly cool technology—I'm bummed I had to pass it up to work for some garbage web-focused tech company becayse Iridium pays pennies on the dollar to their engineering department.
This is a very cool project, happy to see the costs of this stuff coming down a little bit.
When I was an intern 15 years ago I worked on a software library for this https://www.embeddedts.com/products/TS-IRIDIUM Board that does a similar thing (though you would need to stack on a cellular board if you wanted cell modems).
We used them to help Arizona Department of Transportation collect traffic data in remote locations.
We had big plans at that company to make a much smaller, much cheaper 9602 transceiver replacement, but the company got bought out before that could launch.
Very cool project! The company I work for is building a similar sat/cell GPS tracker for civil aviation. In fact we're using the same GPS and Iridium modules.
The costs for satellite SBD messages is definitely eye-watering though. Our device transmits position data every 2 minutes while relying on satellite connections, which we definitely notice the costs of during development. We'd like to look at other providers, but for various reasons (excluding costs) they end up being less ideal than Iridium.
Ah, that's cool. We built a similar system using Iridium SBD and LTE for controlling drones a few years back. SBD isn't the fastest comms around, and it can get rough if you don't have clear sky view, but it works pretty much everywhere, with a small antenna. If you don't have line of sight or LTE, it's a solid fallback.
If you have an amateur radio license, a small HF transmitter would probably successfully send a signal to a receiver on land most of the time, and of course wouldn't cost anything.
HF propagation does vary over time, but you could send a signal far more often to make up for it.
Fun project! Did you look into NTN (Non-Terrestrial Networks) capable modules as an alternative to Iridium? I haven't played with NTN myself, but it seems modules such as SIM7070G-HP-S support LTE-M/NB-IoT as well as NTN networks, and could in theory serve the purpose of your Iridium tranceiver as well as your LTE module. This technology hasn't matured yet, and I suspect the roaming tarriffs are expensive, but I don't know how it compares to Iridium.
>The ultimate motivator for building this project was the opportunity to join the crew of the S/Y Southern Star yacht, which sails in the Arctic.
Anyone know how he got this opportunity? I'd love to join something like this if all I had to do was make a cool Iridium transmitter!
saveitforparts on youtube recently setup an old satellite terminal and went through the pricing of doing so, its expensive.
This is so cool! Thanks for sharing and creating something like this :) BTW do you use Iridium handsets? Do you have recommendations?
Why not trying using something like WSPR? It really depends from the propagation conditions, but it would be interesting IMHO
For anyone else wondering, the satellite transceiver is a RockBoard, which charges:
- $302 for the hardware
- $17/month for a “line fee”
- $0.20/message (50 characters)
Would be nice if there was an actually affordable, programmable Iridium device.