[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker...
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Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to
the Arctic
Author : ChopSticksPlz
Score : 158 points
Date : 2024-10-05 08:36 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fellerts wrote:
| Fun project! Did you look into NTN (Non-Terrestrial Networks)
| capable modules as an alternative to Iridium? I haven't played
| with NTN myself, but it seems modules such as SIM7070G-HP-S
| support LTE-M/NB-IoT as well as NTN networks, and could in theory
| serve the purpose of your Iridium tranceiver as well as your LTE
| module. This technology hasn't matured yet, and I suspect the
| roaming tarriffs are expensive, but I don't know how it compares
| to Iridium.
| lxgr wrote:
| NTN seems to be only offered by geostationary satellite
| operators at this point, which unfortunately puts the use case
| from TFA out of coverage. See for example Inmarsat's coverage:
| https://www.inmarsat.com/content/dam/inmarsat/corporate/core...
|
| I'm not even sure if Skylo is live with Inmarsat at this point,
| or if there are any other NTN providers covering oceans.
| keepamovin wrote:
| This is so cool! Thanks for sharing and creating something like
| this :) BTW do you use Iridium handsets? Do you have
| recommendations?
| lxgr wrote:
| OP is using Iridium SBD according to the article, specifically
| this modem:
| https://www.groundcontrol.com/product/rockblock-9603-compact...
| KMnO4 wrote:
| For anyone else wondering, the satellite transceiver is a
| RockBoard, which charges:
|
| - $302 for the hardware
|
| - $17/month for a "line fee"
|
| - $0.20/message (50 characters)
|
| Would be nice if there was an actually affordable, programmable
| Iridium device.
| causal wrote:
| I've been wondering how Iridium costs are tallied.
|
| Recently had two calls with an Iridium phone, one sent and one
| received, about 1 minute each. T-Mobile charged me $50 for
| those.
|
| I found it very odd - it seemed like Iridium was somehow
| passing the call fees onto me, but I can't be sure because the
| T-Mobile rep I chatted with was unable to comprehend the
| situation (I suspect I was talking to an LLM, but it ultimately
| gave me a $30 rebate at least).
| slaucon wrote:
| I've had to make and pay for an unfortunate number of Iridium
| calls. They can be crazy expensive depending on carrier, who
| all bill them as a call to an international line in the
| country of "Satellite". Usually you pay your carrier's fee
| for outgoing and it's cheaper/free to receive the calls.
|
| It seems like cell carriers always charge more per minute for
| satellite calls than any satellite provider does, so I'm
| guessing they just set their rates conservatively to always
| make a profit on their end. And the demand for satellite
| calls seems like it would be pretty inelastic.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| I've always assumed that answering a phone call would be
| free for me (excepting the dawn of cell phones when they
| had a limited number of minutes per month). If answering a
| sat-phone call is "cheaper" rather than free, does anything
| warn me that I'm incurring extra charges?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Paying to receive a call seems to a mostly American
| phenomenon. In most (all?) of Europe, receiving calls is
| always free, no matter where or how they originate.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| This is why iridium supports calling their regular PSTN
| gateway and then dialing the satellite number recipient,
| then the satellite recipient pays a more palatable
| $1.50/minute:
|
| https://apollosat.com/support/iridium-two-stage-dialing/
| lxgr wrote:
| Receiving calls from Iridium should be free - the caller
| usually pays for the satellite portion of the call.
|
| That usually makes Iridium -> terrestrial calls much more
| economical than the other way around, as telcos usually use
| the opportunity of terrestrial -> satcom calls to add on
| ridiculous margins. Conversely, satellite -> terrestrial
| calling is usually around a dollar per minute or less, these
| days.
|
| In your situation, that would come out to a $50 (or maybe
| $25) charge per minute. Hefty, but that indeed seems to be at
| least in the ballpark of their listed rates (for prepaid
| here, for example:
| https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/connect/international-
| calling-r...).
| causal wrote:
| Nice - thanks for digging. I'm guessing you're right, iirc
| it rounded up the number of minutes.
| atlgator wrote:
| Where did you buy Iridium access for $17/month?
| ac29 wrote:
| https://www.groundcontrol.com/products/iridium/short-
| burst-d...
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| Indeed - a Garmin InReach is about US $500 and already
| ruggedized and tested. I understand the DIY aspect of this
| project is the fun part, but it definitely isn't a way to save
| money.
| stilldavid wrote:
| With a robust used market, as well. I laughed at the battery
| life goals for this - the inreach mini I use lasts _days_.
| matrix2003 wrote:
| Depending on how you look at it, Starlink can be incredibly
| cheap compared to Iridium. It's still not cheap from where I'm
| sitting in my clapped out Honda Civic, though.
|
| Edit: I think $250 for 50GB of truly global data. I can't do
| the math right now, but it seems like a better deal at face
| value.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Depending on how you look at it, Starlink can be incredibly
| cheap compared to Iridium.
|
| They don't have sat-to-sat communications deployed yet, so
| they can work only near the ground stations.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Hmm? Starlink has had sat-to-sat active for a while now.
| They've been making a killing selling services to ships and
| planes lately.
| matrix2003 wrote:
| The laser interlinks have been turned on.
| lxgr wrote:
| $50/month, these days, if I'm not mistaken. (You can only use
| it abroad for two months at a time, but you can update your
| location as as far as I'm aware, and it's $/EUR 50 in most
| places.)
|
| Price wise, it's no comparison, but the two don't directly
| compete yet - power usage and antenna size of Iridium and
| Starlink are orders of magnitude apart (largely due to the
| L-band spectrum available to Iridium globally).
| matrix2003 wrote:
| 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.
| matrix2003 wrote:
| > Would be nice if there was an actually affordable,
| programmable Iridium device.
|
| I remember reading about this a while back, but doesn't SpaceX
| offer some kind of IoT modem for a low cost (not the Starlink
| dishes)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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. 40EUR 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.
| therein wrote:
| 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.
| tylergetsay wrote:
| saveitforparts on youtube recently setup an old satellite
| terminal and went through the pricing of doing so, its expensive.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzTPZLtmSOM&t=664s
| polishdude20 wrote:
| >The ultimate motivator for building this project was the
| opportunity to join the crew of the S/Y Southern Star yacht,
| which sails in the Arctic.
|
| Anyone know how he got this opportunity? I'd love to join
| something like this if all I had to do was make a cool Iridium
| transmitter!
| amlozano wrote:
| This is a very cool project, happy to see the costs of this stuff
| coming down a little bit.
|
| When I was an intern 15 years ago I worked on a software library
| for this https://www.embeddedts.com/products/TS-IRIDIUM Board
| that does a similar thing (though you would need to stack on a
| cellular board if you wanted cell modems).
|
| We used them to help Arizona Department of Transportation collect
| traffic data in remote locations.
|
| We had big plans at that company to make a much smaller, much
| cheaper 9602 transceiver replacement, but the company got bought
| out before that could launch.
| thunder-blue-3 wrote:
| Hearing about Iridium reminded me of how excited I was to take on
| a job managing 5 engineers for them, until they offered me a base
| salary of $135,000 in Phoenix. They work on incredibly cool
| technology--I'm bummed I had to pass it up to work for some
| garbage web-focused tech company becayse Iridium pays pennies on
| the dollar to their engineering department.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Is it just me, or does the wording of this comment imply that
| you passed up the Iridium job to work somewhere else that
| underpays their engineers? Seems like you meant to imply the
| opposite.
| supportengineer wrote:
| I think it's clear he has to work for the "garbage" company
| because it paid more than Iridium did
| barkerja wrote:
| The opposite. Op would have preferred to work at Iridium, if
| only they offered higher pay compared to where they are
| currently.
| thunder-blue-3 wrote:
| yeah I meant Iridium pays pennies on the dollar -
| thadt wrote:
| Ah, that's cool. We built a similar system using Iridium SBD and
| LTE for controlling drones a few years back. SBD isn't the
| fastest comms around, and it can get rough if you don't have
| clear sky view, but it works pretty much everywhere, with a small
| antenna. If you don't have line of sight or LTE, it's a solid
| fallback.
| lormayna wrote:
| Why not trying using something like WSPR? It really depends from
| the propagation conditions, but it would be interesting IMHO
| xadren wrote:
| Very cool project! The company I work for is building a similar
| sat/cell GPS tracker for civil aviation. In fact we're using the
| same GPS and Iridium modules.
|
| The costs for satellite SBD messages is definitely eye-watering
| though. Our device transmits position data every 2 minutes while
| relying on satellite connections, which we definitely notice the
| costs of during development. We'd like to look at other
| providers, but for various reasons (excluding costs) they end up
| being less ideal than Iridium.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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.
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