Thanks, Georgs. Ibm afraid I donbt have a broad view of e-mail at sea, but I can report what works aboard Bluewater. I donbt suggest for a moment that my way of doing it is the only way or the best way, but it works for me! If others know of faster, better or less expensive ways to use e-mail at sea, letbs hear from them. For inshore U.S. waters I use Verizonbs bMobile Webb with a Verizon V620 aircard which connects to the Internet at bbroadbandb speeds. This is entirely satisfactory, though the speeds vary depending on signal strength. East of Boothbay, ME, and in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas we find the service spotty to non-existent, but generally as long as webre within a few miles of shore we have a usable signal. My cell service is also with Verizon, and the monthly charge for the bMobile Webb service is $59.99 plus the usual taxes. I also make it a point to use Wi-Fi when available because itbs often faster than bMobile Web.b. Wi-Fi was a lifesaver for our five months in Venezuela where the Internet connections were few and slow and using Iridium for all e-mail would have been quite expensive. Likewise our month in Bermuda. When offshore or away from both Wi-Fi and Verizon service, for e-mail I use the combination of Iridium and Ocens.net. My Iridium service is with Stratos (www.stratosglobal.com) with minutes purchased from Andy Cool at Explorer Satellite (www.explorersatellite.com) and it now costs $1.35/minute (no taxes or other charges) purchased in prepaid 500-minute blocks good for one year. I use an old model brick-sized Motorola 9500 Iridium phone mounted in a Motorola 9570 docking station. The docking station will also accommodate the newer, smaller, faster Motorola 9505 phones. If I were doing it from scratch today, Ibd buy a 9505 and a docking station. The docking station provides a neat and tidy permanent installation, using an external antenna and an integral dataport. The docking stations are no longer made, and they are hard to findbdonbt believe what you see on the Internet when you Google for them because most companies listing them do not actually have them in stock. Youbll probably have to settle for a used or refurbished one. Explorer Satellite had some in stock a few months ago. If you donbt mind a klunky package involving the phone, antenna, and power cord, you can make do with a much less expensive data port in place of the docking station but take it from me: itbs not pretty or handy to use! For e-mail, I use Ocens Mail from Ocens.net (www.ocens.net), billed as bthe fastest, most reliable e-mail . . . allows you to use your current e-mail software to cost effectively send and receive e-mail over satcomm services.b Pricing as shown on the Ocens website is: $59.00 one-time signup fee plus three months for $72.00, 6 months for $120.00, or 12 months for $220. Ibve found this to be a very good value! When you sign up, you receive an ocens.net e-mail addressbmine is: bluewater@ocens.net With the Ocens e-mail account, I have chosen to limit incoming e-mails to 50K; anything larger goes into my bbigmailb mailbox at Ocens and I receive a short e-mail saying that an e-mail greater than my limit has arrived in the mailbox from (sender) and is being held for disposition. I can choose to download it or hold it until another convenient time when I might have a faster connection. As noted in Sat Phones 101, the software used by Ocens was written by Luis Soltero, a former cruising sailor. From all I can see from a userbs perspective, Luis has done a fine job of creating bullet-proof software that takes maximum advantage of the slow data rates available on satphone connections. Ocens Mail was written specifically to reduce the number of line turnarounds while using compression to increase upload/download speed. Its proprietary e-mail protocol eliminates line turnarounds by sending large compressed streams of data to Ocensb server. The server unpacks the data stream and then, to actually send the mail, carries out the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), the standard for e-mail transmissions across the Internet. Receiving mail uses the same wireless-enhanced technology. All incoming mail is collected by the server, then packaged into a single compressed stream of data which is sent to the e-mail client in a single unidirectional transfer. The e-mail program on your computer parses the data, breaking it up into individual mail messages and presents them to you for viewing. What does all this mean? According to Ocens, the bottom line is that on average Ocens Mail is 7 to 10 times faster than the competition when it comes to delivering e-mail. More details on how it works and what it does are available on the Ocens website. To connect your computer to your Iridium dataport, you can use the built-in serial port on the computer. No serial port on your bputer? Then you MUST use the proprietary USB-to-serial adaptor sold by Ocens ($70). Ocens does not support other USB-to-serial adaptors because they generally do not work to connect to satphones. Take it from me, donbt waste your time or theirs trying to use one you already own; I tried it and wasted everybodybs time! In my case, setting up the Ocens e-mail and getting all the software settings right took some hand-holding from Ocens tech support. Rachelle Gregory at tech support patiently walked me through the setup, offering many helpful suggestions. I was clear she'd gone down this road hundreds of times before! Several months into my use of Ocens (when the boat was in Venezuela) I experienced hardware problems that were hard to trace, and Rachelle showed great patience in helping me pinpoint the problem. This one proved beyond Rachellebs reach, so it was on to the big gunsbI began dealing with Luis Soltero, who is not an Ocens employee but who clearly has a real interest in keeping users happy; he was like a bird dog running it down! After we trouble-shot the problem together every possible way, all evidence pointed to the Motorola 9500 Iridium phone itself. I replaced the phone with another and the problems disappeared. So, how does it all come together in the real world when I want to send or receive e-mail? When I use the Iridium connection, I write my e-mails in bIScribeb, the e-mail client (program) that came as part of the Ocens Mail software package, though you can use most any e-mail client you want, including Outlook or Eudora. Once my e-mail is ready to go and bsentb from the e-mail client (but not yet from the computer), itbs time to put the Iridium connection to work. I plug the USB-to-serial adaptor into my e-mail laptop and Iridium docking station, call up the Ocens Wireless Mail Gateway program on my laptop, then press the bGob icon which automatically dials and connects the phone to the Ocens server. Then I watch while the program goes through the following steps: CMail[0] 12:15:00 Opening connection to email.ocens.net CMail[4816] 12:15:00 No mail to send CMail[4816] 12:15:00 Receiving mail for bluewater CMail[4816] 12:15:03 Receiving 2 mail messages total size = 2637 bytes CMail[4816] 12:15:03 Receiving 1158421065.M826130 3447 CMail[4816] 12:15:03 Receiving 1158422961.M980855 1686 CMail[4816] 12:15:03 Done receiving mail for bluewater CMail[4816] 12:15:03 Mail transaction complete CMail[4816] 12:15:03 Finished. The exchange above was done using the Verizon Mobile Web connection, so it took only three seconds. The same exchange done with Iridium might have taken 40 b 60 seconds, including the initial bhandshakeb connection. The Iridium phone is on line only from the time the connection is opened until itbs bFinishedb; the Ocens Wireless Mail Gateway software automatically makes and breaks the connection. Once the program reaches bFinishedb I remove the USB-to-serial adaptor from the laptop. I find that I can typically send/receive five or six short e-mails in a minute or two of Iridium online time. To save airtime, I rarely send or receive attachments, though I choose to receive weather maps from time to time and halfway between North Carolina and Pureto Rico I sent a sketch of a broken part so a replacement could be fabricated and waiting for me when I reached port. Itbs probably clear from this that I do not keep my e-mail laptop permanently connected to the Iridium phone as some users do. This is simply because the way we have things laid out aboard Bluewater itbs more convenient to plug in only when we need to upload/download mail, something that takes a few seconds. How do I know when we have e-mail? Our Iridium phone sounds a bbeepb each time an e-mail is delivered to our Ocens mailbox, and I can scroll through a list of the e-mails awaiting downloading right on the Iridium phonebs tiny screen. Typically on a passage I connect twice a day to upload and download mail. Let me mention one more nice Iridium feature: anyone who has an Iridium phone and a service account can receive an unlimited number of very short (160 characters including spaces) free e-mails right on the phonebs screen with no need for Ocens software or even a computer! (A sample message might be along the lines: bGood news . . . itbs a boy for Mike and Maria! Everybodybs delighted. See you in Papeete on the 15th. Love, Mom) A sender can send the e-mails by going to www.iridium.com and clicking on bSend a Satellite Message.b The sender must have the Iridium number of the subscriber to use this service. Unfortunately, there's no equivalent for the Iridium user for responding to the short message e-mail. Is the Iridim/Ocens combination perfect? Absolutely not! But having a basic e-mail capability anywhere on earth one can take a yacht truly adds a new dimension to cruising. At bottom line, I am a very satisfied user of Iridium and Ocens mail and would not want to be without it. For the record, I have no ownership or financial connections with any of the companies mentioned here. I should mention that have recommended Explorer Satellite to many people, so owner Andy Cool is always very attentive when I call and ask for help. --Milt Baker, Nordhavn 47 Bluewater, Annapolis, MD Georgs wrote: Thank you, Milt, for the excellent recap of what's what with satellite telephones. I'm sure there would be a lot of takers if you gave the same 101 treatment to email at sea, when you have some time. --Georgs -- Georgs Kolesnikovs Your host at Trawlers & Trawlering, formerly Trawler World, since 1997