Iridium Satellite Phone as Modem on OS X
December 29th, 2008 by Ken Mankoff
I have an Iridium 9505A and a MacBook and the necessary hardware and software to tether the two and use the phone as a modem. I can now make voice and data calls from anywhere in the world where I have a clear view of the sky. It took a while to get it set up so I’ll document it here…
My Hardware:
- Iridium 9505A
- Unmarked adapter for base that provides 9 pin female serial port
- Serial cable, 9 pin male to 9 pin female
- Belkin Keyspan Serial to USB converter USA-19HS
- Cable to convert from square-ish shaped output of 19HS to regular USB
- MacBook
My Software:
- Belkin driver for OS X 10.5.x (version 2.5 dated January 22, 2008)
- OS X 10.5.6
- Modem script from here
How To Set It Up (source 0, source 1):
- Install Keyspan driver
- Put modem script into ~/Library/Modem Scripts
- Connect phone to adapter to serial cable to adapter to USB cable to computer
- Turn on phone
- Go to System Preferences > Network
- Select + at bottom left to add net network device
- Select USA19H1d1P1.
- Name it something nice like “Iridium”
- Set telephone number to 008816000022
- Set account name to your phone number
- Set password to “password”
- Select connect button
Notes:
- Sources (linked above) suggest it works with other phone numbers (025, 023) and with different name/password pairs, but none of those worked for me.
- Phone should take about 30 seconds from when you select Connect to make a connection. Do not test by loading a normal web page. Test with low bandwidth test such as ping or lynx.
- Data connection requires a much better signal strength than voice. I could only get this to work with a clear sky view of many steradians. Voice worked in much more secluded locations.
- I haven’t done much with this yet other than post a small photo but intend to test some limits when in the field, use lynx, links, ssh, etc.
- Set up a new Location in System Preferences that does not have Airport or Ethernet and only has the Iridium network device to ease testing.
- Enable “Show modem status in menu bar” in Network System Preferences to make dialing easy. No need to re-enter System Preferences anymore.
August 13th, 2010 at 17:05
How fast is the tethered thruput?
August 13th, 2010 at 17:39
I don’t remember the exact speeds, but it was awfully slow. Something like 0.5KB/s or ~500 B/s. I remember thinking it was not much faster than I can type…
I know at the time (~2 years ago) they had a faster modem but I did not have that one.
Techniques to use the internet at those speeds are:
Quit all software (don’t want Firefox or iTunes downloading stuff in the background).
Turn off system updates so the OS doesn’t try to download anything.
Quit *everything* but one or two terminals. Be aware that even a small widget in your menu bar is probably wasting valuable bandwidth.
Use a terminal and lynx/links for web access.
Pre-bookmark (in lynx/links) the mobile/WAP versions of sites. Even if you aren’t getting graphics, all the text, css, and js files add up
For email, use a command-line client: Fetchmail, pine/alpine, mutt, gnus, etc.
With this setup I could do most of what I needed to do. I could write as much email as I wanted, but it took 30 seconds just to sent one email. I could read emails if people sent them plain-text without attachments. I could google things I needed to find. I even downloaded some small software (minicom @ ~700KB) but that took over an hour and multiple re-connects, so you’ll want to be comfortable using wget or curl with the continue options.
If you can get Inmarsat your bandwidth will be much higher, but we were in locations not covered by Inmarsat. If you are within a few 10s of km of shoreline you might even get a cell signal.
Good luck and please post back with any advice / tips / stories you have.
June 25th, 2011 at 10:14
I’m planning some trips to the middle of nowhere (Africa, Mongolia, Amazon) and am looking for a way to upload posts, photos and videos to my blog in the field.
Is this a viable and consistent way to do it? Do you have any other suggestions?
Karen
June 25th, 2011 at 13:58
The Iridium modem I had was far too slow for video. One low quality photo would take about a minute to upload. I don’t think this would work for you. There are faster Iridium modems, but you are still using modem technology from the late 1980s. There are also other companies (GlobalStar, InMarSat) with much higher bandwidth that you should look into. We were forced to use Iridium because we were so far south the other satellites don’t provide coverage there. They will provide coverage in the areas you mentioned. Costs are quite high. You should consider waiting until you get to local internet cafes and upload from there.