It is $400 up front. The text and email links on their home page don’t go anywhere.
Rental is $30 a month giving 100 messages, thereafter $0.27 per message. There is a $5 per month fee even when suspended. Not cheap! But then Iridium is not cheap… I guess a lot of people are trying hard to make money around its crappy bandwidth.
It connects via wifi, and they claim:
so it looks like it presents some generic HTTP web interface to the wifi client.
One could deliver tafs and metars over sms very easily.
The email facility is interesting because loads of terrestrial GSM networks don’t interconnect with Iridium or Thuraya for SMS. In fact some terrestrial networks don’t talk to each other, across borders. I have access to a private German HTTP-SMS site whose SMS messages do not (usually) get delivered to T-Mobile UK. So delivering a message to somebody on the ground by email is very useful.
At first glance it looks like a poor alternative to the DeLorme InReach which offers flight tracking as well and subscription plans for as little as one month. In-flight METARS are a doddle with the DeLorme products.
