On Jun 8, 2:15 pm, Bob wrote:
Personally, less complicated is better that is unless you are
the second typ of person who supports use of ssb tx

Are you kidding? HF is much simpler than sat phones.

No not at all.......... you see I do not look inside the case. I look
to reliability, expense, and ease of use. So when I say iridium is
more simple campoared to SSB I am not refering to the inside circuits
I refer to reliablity, ease of use, overall coast including
installation and maintainence hours.

I think you may be confused. In my experience, equipment reliability
is very similar as long as the sat phone is permanently installed; if
a handheld phone is used it is subject to all the damage due to drops
and to water as any other bit of handheld gear. For ease of use the
sat phone is certainly ahead, particularly on voice calls with the
added benefit of a familiar user interface (just dial the number).
Cost goes up on the sat phone with time as the minutes are still
pretty expensive. Installation is similar in complexity. Maintenance
is close to zero for both.

One of the hidden "gotchas" of sat phones is that for any reasonable
chance of a connection you need the car kit and external antenna. At
that point you have all the same kind of installation woes of an SSB,
although the power wiring is a good bit easier. The installation is
much more finicky for the RF side of a sat phone.

For me it comes down to the ability to get a message through. I don't
want to spend more time than necessary hunched over the nav station.
In my personal experience, based on use of both marine SSB and ham
radio and of sat phones at sea on passage, sometimes with both on
board, the message gets through more reliably with the radios than
with a sat phone. On a delivery of a Swan 47 we gave up on the sat
phone and used the SSB for everything. On Valentines Day the watch
schedule was a mess as we all tried to make calls home. It took hours.
I should have thought to look for a phone patch.

There are certainly cruisers who are quite content with sat phones.
Evans Starzinger and Beth Leonard come to mind. Very few have any
experience with SSB - they made their choices and it turned out okay
for them. Good for them. From what I understand of their sat phone
installation, including the software and the special shoreside
services for compression and discontiuous data transmission (to
accommodate dropped calls), the sat phone rig is the most complex
system there is on Hawk. Their are others who have struggled mightily
to get sat phone installations to work properly. The same--good and
bad--can be said about the experience of cruisers with SSB. Some of us
have used both sorts of technology side-by-side; I for one would much
rather have an SSB than a sat phone.

and youre not a Sailing/Vessel you are a Sailing/Yacht (S/Y)

Yacht seems rather pretentious. She is quite a nice boat though.

A good friend did a cost analysis on long distance communication for
his new Cat. He calculated that, not including installation, the SSB
was more expensive then the Sat-phone, as well as being more
complicated to install on a new boat. So he installed the Sat-phone.

Interesting. Do you know what he included in running costs? Was it
amortization of the up-front equipment costs over a small number of
years? There is some quite good equipment available that isn't so
dear, but if you just tick the box for an Icom 802 things can get
pricey, especially for the international GMDSS version. The running
costs though are quite minor. Winlink is free assuming a ham license
and the commercial e-mail services are all around 250 USD / year.

If you have to talk directly to someone who doesn't have a radio it is
a bit more work. You can still find hams who run phone patches (free).
On the commercial side ShipCom has reduced their rates to 1 USD /
minute for calls to the US. Rates for other countries vary by country.
It's definitely more work than dialing a sat phone but cheaper.

I priced a similar system in Singapore a year or so ago and from
memory you could get on the air for less then US$1,000, closer to
700-800 U.S. dollars.

And then you go back later for a car-kit and an antenna after you
become sufficiently frustrated with poor connections and dropped
calls. If you are really unlucky, you dropped your sat phone over the
side just after your laptop got doused by water since you were in the
cockpit trying to get a connection after giving up below.

73 es sail fast, dave
S/V Auspicious