Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic

The keyword of the problem there is Iridium. Their SBD (short burst data) and in fact all their services are just extremely expensive. This reseller doesn't really seem to put much margin on it.

When I had a sat phone (needed to travel sometimes to questionable places for work) I used Thuraya which is much cheaper for airtime. 40€ gets you a whole year's worth of inbound service (airtime) and about 15 mins of call credit for outbound. With iridium that gets you about one month.

But Thuraya only had 2 active sats. One geostationary over the middle east and one over the far east. No service over the Americas. The Asian one failed early this year and the coverage for the region which can't be met by the other one is now inoperable.

The middle east sat is actually beyond its planned service life and if it goes down there's no immediate backup. Though a replacement is ready for launch according to Wikipedia. You also need visibility of the southern horizon (or northern, if you're in the southern hemisphere). So for hiking in valleys it's not a good bet. The same goes for Inmarsat for that matter. But they do have more sats.

Iridium in contrast is fully worldwide, has a robust constellation of many low earth orbit sats that move across the sky so you don't need to see a fixed point. It's more robust for emergencies. But the price is much higher. It's a trade-off. You get what you pay for.

As I no longer travel for work but do hike, I ditched the Thuraya and got a Garmin InReach which runs on iridium. But that costs more than Thuraya even though it can only send messages. Though with their latest cost increase I might just drop it and find something cheaper. Maybe Starlink direct to cell.

The opposite. Op would have preferred to work at Iridium, if only they offered higher pay compared to where they are currently.

You can actually achieve this even with Iridium Go. I tried it years ago and it worked.

It isn't too documented, or let me say it isn't documented at all but you can write AT commands and start raw TCP connections and read and write to that socket.

And it is actually reasonably priced. I tried to open SSH connections and it was barely usable. You get a very small number of bits per second.

Edit: Found the private repo I had created back then in case anyone has any interest. It looks like I did something like this:

    func (sess *IridiumGoSession) ActivateDataWithCustomSettings() (*PerformTaskResponse, error) {
     return sess.PerformTask("2",
      MakeOption("set state", "true", "bool"),
      MakeOption("Firewall allow all traffic", "false", "bool"),
      MakeOption("Firewall exceptions", "XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX-all-tcp", "bool"),
      MakeOption("Enable DNS forwarding", "false", "bool"),
      MakeOption("Dial number", "0088160000330", "bool"),
     )
    }

Need to replace `XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX` with the IP you want to establish a connection to. And I don't know where I got 0088160000330 from. I guess that's the internet call number.

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.

The higher rate gets you oceanic use, which is a big benefit of iridium.

You are correct that it can be $50, but AFAIK that’s a different plan that is land or near-land only.