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.
Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been wondering how Iridium costs are tallied. Recently had two calls with an Iridium phone, one sent and one received, about 1 minute each. T-Mobile charged me $50 for those. I found it very odd - it seemed like Iridium was somehow passing the call fees onto me, but I can't be sure because the T-Mobile rep I chatted with was unable to comprehend the situation (I suspect I was talking to an LLM, but it ultimately…
Receiving calls from Iridium should be free – the caller usually pays for the satellite portion of the call. That usually makes Iridium -> terrestrial calls much more economical than the other way around, as telcos usually use the opportunity of terrestrial -> satcom calls to add on ridiculous margins. Conversely, satellite -> terrestrial calling is usually around a dollar per minute or less, these days. In your situ…
Nice - thanks for digging. I'm guessing you're right, iirc it rounded up the number of minutes.
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#23Hearing 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.
Is it just me, or does the wording of this comment imply that you passed up the Iridium job to work somewhere else that underpays their engineers? Seems like you meant to imply the opposite.
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been wondering how Iridium costs are tallied. Recently had two calls with an Iridium phone, one sent and one received, about 1 minute each. T-Mobile charged me $50 for those. I found it very odd - it seemed like Iridium was somehow passing the call fees onto me, but I can't be sure because the T-Mobile rep I chatted with was unable to comprehend the situation (I suspect I was talking to an LLM, but it ultimately…
I’ve had to make and pay for an unfortunate number of Iridium calls. They can be crazy expensive depending on carrier, who all bill them as a call to an international line in the country of “Satellite”. Usually you pay your carrier’s fee for outgoing and it’s cheaper/free to receive the calls. It seems like cell carriers always charge more per minute for satellite calls than any satellite provider does, so I’m guessi…
I've always assumed that answering a phone call would be free for me (excepting the dawn of cell phones when they had a limited number of minutes per month). If answering a sat-phone call is "cheaper" rather than free, does anything warn me that I'm incurring extra charges?
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#25For 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.
Depending on how you look at it, Starlink can be incredibly cheap compared to Iridium. It’s still not cheap from where I’m sitting in my clapped out Honda Civic, though. Edit: I think $250 for 50GB of truly global data. I can’t do the math right now, but it seems like a better deal at face value.
$50/month, these days, if I'm not mistaken. (You can only use it abroad for two months at a time, but you can update your location as as far as I'm aware, and it's $/€ 50 in most places.)
Price wise, it's no comparison, but the two don't directly compete yet – power usage and antenna size of Iridium and Starlink are orders of magnitude apart (largely due to the L-band spectrum available to Iridium globally).
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#26This is so cool! Thanks for sharing and creating something like this :) BTW do you use Iridium handsets? Do you have recommendations?
OP is using Iridium SBD according to the article, specifically this modem: https://www.groundcontrol.com/product/rockblock-9603-compact...
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#27Hearing 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.
Is it just me, or does the wording of this comment imply that you passed up the Iridium job to work somewhere else that underpays their engineers? Seems like you meant to imply the opposite.
I think it's clear he has to work for the "garbage" company because it paid more than Iridium did
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been wondering how Iridium costs are tallied. Recently had two calls with an Iridium phone, one sent and one received, about 1 minute each. T-Mobile charged me $50 for those. I found it very odd - it seemed like Iridium was somehow passing the call fees onto me, but I can't be sure because the T-Mobile rep I chatted with was unable to comprehend the situation (I suspect I was talking to an LLM, but it ultimately…
I’ve had to make and pay for an unfortunate number of Iridium calls. They can be crazy expensive depending on carrier, who all bill them as a call to an international line in the country of “Satellite”. Usually you pay your carrier’s fee for outgoing and it’s cheaper/free to receive the calls. It seems like cell carriers always charge more per minute for satellite calls than any satellite provider does, so I’m guessi…
This is why iridium supports calling their regular PSTN gateway and then dialing the satellite number recipient, then the satellite recipient pays a more palatable $1.50/minute:
Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#29Hearing 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.
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Re: Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic
#30Ah, 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.