I (Kevin) climbed up the South Needle in North Vancouver today with our InReach and our GO! Iridium Satellite router to see how they performed. The South Needle proved the perfect testing ground being remote and completely out of cell range.
The InReach was tethered to my iPhone 6 via bluetooth and relayed my location to the phone throughout the journey. I could look at the phone at any time and zoom into the map to see exactly where I was. It also tracked my journey and automatically relayed this back to a map page on our website.
The GO! Iridium is different than the InReach in that acts like a wifi router and creates its own wifi hotspot that I can connect the phone too. I turn it on when I need to, look for its wifi signal on my phone and then connect.
I can't start surfing the internet - speeds run about 14kb a minute - but it allows me to send and receive emails as well as push out images if I make them small enough. The reasonable limit is about 50kb as it will take at least 4 minutes to upload something of this size. The quality is surprisingly good. The image attached here is the image I sent.
I remember this process being such a struggle while skiing to the South Pole and while traversing the North West Passage. The hook up was confusing, it required glitchy software and it all had to be fed through a satellite phone. It was a crap shoot every time. This system works seamlessly and will make communication much easier on the Mackenzie. You gotta love technology!
The InReach was tethered to my iPhone 6 via bluetooth and relayed my location to the phone throughout the journey. I could look at the phone at any time and zoom into the map to see exactly where I was. It also tracked my journey and automatically relayed this back to a map page on our website.
The GO! Iridium is different than the InReach in that acts like a wifi router and creates its own wifi hotspot that I can connect the phone too. I turn it on when I need to, look for its wifi signal on my phone and then connect.
I can't start surfing the internet - speeds run about 14kb a minute - but it allows me to send and receive emails as well as push out images if I make them small enough. The reasonable limit is about 50kb as it will take at least 4 minutes to upload something of this size. The quality is surprisingly good. The image attached here is the image I sent.
I remember this process being such a struggle while skiing to the South Pole and while traversing the North West Passage. The hook up was confusing, it required glitchy software and it all had to be fed through a satellite phone. It was a crap shoot every time. This system works seamlessly and will make communication much easier on the Mackenzie. You gotta love technology!
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