Iridium portable sat com

[ultrarunner]

Anyone using the 9505? Comments? Etc...

thanks

 

[cptsesso]

We have a 9500 loaner. Waiting for our 9505 to ship. Works great and a very cheap alternative to a fixed install. Also, you can take it with you wherever you go.

 

[ultrarunner]

Do you need to utilize an external antenna when using the plane, or does the fixed phone antenna work fine?

 

[cptsesso]

The antenna on the phone is detachable. If you need it in the cockpit, it works well with the portable antenna. In the back, we had a fixed antenna installed. A coax cable runs from the antenna to the bottom of the sidewall in the rear of the cabin where it ends with a BNC connector. From there, it runs into a drawer and attaches to the phone with a very thin, flexible wire.

The only drawback is the phone has the flexible wire attached to it. We have it set up with about 6' of cable to reach the rear club seating. The owner does not mind this as total cost was about $3500 and he can take it with him wherever he goes outside of the plane.

At my previous job we also had a sat phone installed. It was a fixed install and ran about $25,000 and it could only be used in the plane.

 

[Dumbledore]

The antenna on the phone is detachable. If you need it in the cockpit, it works well with the portable antenna.

That depends on what cockpit you're talking about. We've found the performance to be poor through heated winscreens. An external antenna was a must for our planes.

Having said that, the clients are ecstatic about the sub-$20,000 acquisition and installation price tag on their ship. The phone bill beats the SATCOM on the other planes as well. Taking it with you is nice but a bit cumbersome. It gets the job done though!

Be careful about the connection to an external antenna. The Motorola says avoid losses of >5 db in the antenna connection. The loss for each connector is something like .85 - 1.0 db and you have connectors at the phone, the wall plate, and one more at the antenna, so you start things off with almost a 3 db loss before you add wires. With losses in the coax itself you have to be careful about the length of the wires both to the antenna from your inside jack as well as the wire from the jack to the handset to avoid rendering the phone unusable on the external antenna. Once installed be sure to test it and make sure it's doing what you want it to do. If not, tweak until it does but start with the antenna hookup if there are problems!

 

[cptsesso]

RE: Dumbledore

We have a Westwind and the phone with the portable antenna works well in the cockpit. Also, with the fixed antenna in back, the phone has perfect reception.

The only inconvenience with the whole thing is our plane does not have any outlets to hook up the charger to. I have to remember to take the phone with me after a trip to recharge the batteries.