Show HN: I built a Iridium/LTE satellite GPS tracker and took it to the Arctic

For anyone else wondering, the satellite transceiver is a RockBoard, which charges:<p>- $302 for the hardware<p>- $17&#x2F;month for a “line fee”<p>- $0.20&#x2F;message (50 characters)<p>Would be nice if there was an actually affordable, programmable Iridium device.

Great stuff! I&#x27;m starting to work a lot on the satellite space (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sourcemeta.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sourcemeta.com</a>), building a binary serialization format around JSON called JSON BinPack (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com</a>) that is extremely space-efficient to pack more documents in the same Iridium uplink&#x2F;downlink operation (up to 74% more compact than Protocol Buffers. See reproducible benchmark here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2211.12799" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2211.12799</a>).<p>It is still a heavy work in progress, but if anybody here is suffering from expensive Iridium bills, I would love to connect and discuss to make sure JSON BinPack is built the right way!

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&#x27;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.

This is a very cool project, happy to see the costs of this stuff coming down a little bit.<p>When I was an intern 15 years ago I worked on a software library for this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.embeddedts.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;TS-IRIDIUM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.embeddedts.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;TS-IRIDIUM</a> Board that does a similar thing (though you would need to stack on a cellular board if you wanted cell modems).<p>We used them to help Arizona Department of Transportation collect traffic data in remote locations.<p>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.

Very cool project! The company I work for is building a similar sat&#x2F;cell GPS tracker for civil aviation. In fact we&#x27;re using the same GPS and Iridium modules.<p>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&#x27;d like to look at other providers, but for various reasons (excluding costs) they end up being less ideal than Iridium.

Ah, that&#x27;s cool. We built a similar system using Iridium SBD and LTE for controlling drones a few years back. SBD isn&#x27;t the fastest comms around, and it can get rough if you don&#x27;t have clear sky view, but it works pretty much everywhere, with a small antenna. If you don&#x27;t have line of sight or LTE, it&#x27;s a solid fallback.

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&#x27;t cost anything.<p>HF propagation does vary over time, but you could send a signal far more often to make up for it.

Fun project! Did you look into NTN (Non-Terrestrial Networks) capable modules as an alternative to Iridium? I haven&#x27;t played with NTN myself, but it seems modules such as SIM7070G-HP-S support LTE-M&#x2F;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&#x27;t matured yet, and I suspect the roaming tarriffs are expensive, but I don&#x27;t know how it compares to Iridium.

&gt;The ultimate motivator for building this project was the opportunity to join the crew of the S&#x2F;Y Southern Star yacht, which sails in the Arctic.<p>Anyone know how he got this opportunity? I&#x27;d love to join something like this if all I had to do was make a cool Iridium transmitter!

saveitforparts on youtube recently setup an old satellite terminal and went through the pricing of doing so, its expensive.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yzTPZLtmSOM&amp;t=664s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yzTPZLtmSOM&amp;t=664s</a>

This is so cool! Thanks for sharing and creating something like this :) BTW do you use Iridium handsets? Do you have recommendations?

Why not trying using something like WSPR? It really depends from the propagation conditions, but it would be interesting IMHO