9 ms·
Minimum order of 25, so roughly $3725 for one year unless you get the "eval kit" @ $449. USD $5/MO PER DEVICE Provides 750 data packets per device per month (
by arriu 4y ago
Minimum order of 25, so roughly $3725 for one year unless you get the "eval kit" @ $449.
USD $5/MO PER DEVICE
Provides 750 data packets per device per month (up to 192 Bytes per packet), including up to 60 downlink (2-way) data packets
- ge96 4y agoCurious how it compares to Iridium, I've seen those with Sparkfun
- initplus 4y agoI don't have numbers in front of me but it looks waaay cheaper. Seems they are trying to undercut Iridium SBD on price.
- cozzyd 4y agoIt's significantly cheaper but also in a frequency range that likely requires a bigger antenna.
- pmorici 4y agoOrder of magnitude less expensive.
- girvo 4y agoInmarsat is surprisingly more competitive to Swarm than we expected, but man it is difficult to get passed all the bullshit resellers, which is where Swarm is way easier. But for our use cases Inmarsat has been a better fit right now, though we use both on our board depending on the deployment: if we don’t need as much bandwidth and are okay with the black out times where we’re not covered by Swarm, it’s great
- lxgr 4y agoInteresting, I didn’t know Inmarsat offers IoT connectivity, or are you using regular BGAN (SMS or data)?
- girvo 4y agoThey do have Elera: https://www.inmarsat.com/en/solutions-services/enterprise/services/elera-iot.html https://www.inmarsat.com/en/solutions-services/enterprise/se... But we’re using IDP as it’s not really out yet. Next year hopefully!
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoWhat might somebody (or some company) use this for? 192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?
- eterevsky 4y agoWeather station or any kind of remote sensor that you want to keep in some remote area.
- reaperducer 4y agoSilence sense and FCC-required logging for a mountaintop broadcast transmitter.
- dfc 4y agoWhat is "silence sense"?
- isomorphic 4y agoI'm speculating, but certain FCC licenses require you to transmit without significant gaps on your licensed frequencies or be fined. (The theory being that others could be making better use of your frequency since you aren't using it.) If your transmission gear goes down for whatever reason, you want to notify the FCC before others do. E.g., https://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-slaps-birach-broadcasting-with-17-500-fine-for-unauthorized-silence/article_4cab3f9c-6871-11ec-93a9-8331c9e980cd.html https://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-slaps-birach-broadcasti...
- reaperducer 4y agoIt's a circuit that alerts people to dead carriers. People in radio station studios generally don't listen to the over-the-air signal because there is a delay. A silence sense is a circuit that monitors the over-the-air signal and takes action when it's been too quiet for too long. This is usually an indication that something has failed, either at the transmitter, or in the studio-transmitter link. It is sometimes triggered by dramatic pauses in classical music and talk show content, but in those cases is ignored by the DJ/host/producer. They've been around forever, and can be made from simple analog circuits. In the stations where I've worked, if the silence sense activated, a red light lit up in the DJ booth, and the engineering department. Some stations had a secondary silence sense that would wait a bit longer, and light up a light bulb at the receptionist's desk because she had the master list of phone numbers to call the right people in case of a transmission failure. There are thousands of radio station transmitters that are far enough away from the originating studio that it's not possible for the studio to hear the over-the-air signal, so a silence sense on top of a mountain, next to the transmitter could send an alert packet via this satellite service back to the studio to let someone know something is wrong.
- reaperducer 4y agoProvides 750 data packets per device per month (up to 192 Bytes per packet) 144,000 bytes. Almost the capacity as a Commodore 1541 disk drive. 40 years ago it would have been unfathomable that a regular schmoe could transmit a floppy disk via satellite for just $5.
- arriu 4y agoI love this type of tech and want to get in on that sweet 144,000 bytes of data at 5 per month, but... it's not just 5 per month, it's a minimum investment of 500 unfortunately. Also, not sure where to find a decent Commodore system these days to utilize this plan :)
- moralestapia 4y agoSure, but 40 years have passed since then and 144K peanuts for any real world application. A quick example, you have a sensor that sends a single metric every minute. Suppose that you can pack that info (sensor id, metric type and data) in 32 bytes. You're looking at about 1.2MB/month of data (8 times your 144K), which will come to about $40/month. Quite expensive for a single data point, but I can imagine several use cases where that cost can be easily justified.
- Taniwha 4y agoYeah but once a minute is overkill for lots of things - remote river flood warning every 15 minutes, river water quality once an hour, temp or rain fall once and hour
- wildzzz 4y agoUp to the minute sensor data for something so remote that it needs a satellite uplink is either going to be for something incredibly critical or totally overkill and a waste of money. With Swarm, you could be waiting up to 2 hours between passes that last anywhere between 10 and 50 minutes so it's not like you'll have your data instantly for large portions of the day.
- 4y ago
- I_dev_outdoors 4y agoThere's also a sparkfun dev board linked from that page which is around $150. It mentions that if ordering less than 25
- eternityforest 4y agoSparkfun has evaluated boards for $149 although they are SparkX experimental and could go away. Could always do a groupgets anyway.