Putting Satellite Phone to the Jungle Test

A couple of weeks ago I was in Sydney, Australia, writing about how businesspeople can stay in touch when they’re traveling around the world. But business trips don’t always take you to urban areas where communications and even electricity can be taken for granted.

This week I’m in the Amazon rain forest in Peru covering an educational project, but just because I’m more than 100 miles from the nearest town with electricity and phone service doesn’t mean that I have to be out of contact.

To stay in touch with co-workers and family back home, I borrowed a Motorola Iridium satellite phone and pager.

Although the phone does let me make and receive calls from any spot on or above the Earth, it’s definitely an emerging technology that has a way to go before it’s completely reliable on all terrain.

The phone actually works better here in the remote jungle than it did in Lima or in San Francisco, where buildings and other obstacles got in the way.

When using a satellite phone, you need to be outdoors with the antenna pointing directly toward the sky. I can’t use it in the thick of the jungle because even trees can interfere. Fortunately, I’m never far from the river, where there is a clear shot at the sky.

The Iridium system, unlike the way it is with other satellite phones, does not require you to get out a compass to help aim the antenna directly at a satellite. Iridium uses 66 satellites that orbit about 485 miles above the Earth. In theory, you’re always in range of at least one satellite.

I had hoped to use the phone for my daily live radio reports on KNX, but it quickly became obvious that that would be out of the question. When using the phone from a clearing in the rain forest, I was unable to make a call about a third of the time. And when the call did go through, it was sometimes dropped within a minute or two. Quality ranges from quite good to terrible. On two occasions people asked me if I was tired because my voice sounded slurred. It only seemed that way because the phone sometimes garbled my voice.

I called an engineer at Iridium who told me that the phone works best when there is little or nothing between you and the horizon. That way the phone can communicate with more satellites as they orbit the Earth. To test that, I took a small boat into the middle of a wide section of the river, and, sure enough, the phone worked every time I tried it. Quality ranged from good to mediocre, but the calls were never dropped.

Even from a jungle clearing I could almost always get a connection if I kept trying for a few minutes. The call might be dropped or the quality deteriorate, but I was in a remote area of the rain forest where access to any phone, however temperamental, was not an option.

The phone can also be used for incoming calls. But any call to an Iridium phone is considered an international call, and it will be billed at international rates that vary according to where both parties are situated.

As an option, the phone can be configured to work with some cellular systems so it can be used as a cell phone in areas that have service and as a satellite phone anywhere else.

As you might expect, state-of-the-art global communications doesn’t come cheap. The Motorola 9500 Iridium phone that I’m using costs about $3,000 to purchase plus $79 a month for basic service. Using the phone is quite costly, ranging from $1.95 to $8 a minute depending on where you are and where you are calling.

In addition to the phone, I’m also carrying a Motorola Iridium pager. It works like a regular alphanumeric pager except that it relies on satellites instead of land-based radio technology. The pager seems to be rock solid. It may take a few minutes for a page to arrive, but they do get through. The pager itself costs $400 plus $120 a month, but there is no charge for incoming pages. Callers from the United States must dial an international call to send you a page if you’re in a foreign country, but they can send free e-mail or use the Iridium Web site to page you as long as the messages are shorter than 220 characters.

Considering the prices and the mixed reliability, you need a pretty compelling business reason to justify using mobile satellite communications. But those same objections were raised about cellular when it first became available. It may take a while, but we’ll come to a point that making a call from a canoe in the Amazon will be as easy as using a cell phone in the United States.