I’ve used an Iridium satellite telephone for years. It’s an insurance policy - I travel all over the world, and to remote areas in the US and having the ability to have simple and reliable two-way communications is worth the $40 per month standing charge (and about $1.50 per minute).

Iridium uses a constellation of 66 operational satellites in low Earth orbit, and is the only satellite telephone communications company that gives complete global coverage, even at the poles.

My handset, a Motorola 9505, is large, bulky, heavy and slow - it’s starting to show its age. After a software upgrade a few years ago, it’ll now send SMS messages and emails, and there is also a data connection kit (with a DB-9 serial connection), though at a maximum of 2.4kbps, it’s barely usable and once I had the ability to send SMS messages and emails, I gave up using it.

I put up with both the age of the handset and almost $500 per year of standing charges as there were no other options (other providers didn’t give the coverage I require).

Lately, however, Inmarsat, a well-know satellite communications company unveiled their new satellite phone, the IsatPhone Pro. It’s still like a cell phone from the year 2000, but it’s lighter, faster and more compact than the Motorola 9505. It uses the Inmarsat 4 constellation of satellites, 3 birds in geosynchronous orbit to give almost global coverage (the exception being the polar regions). These are the same satellites that provide the BGAN service.

As well as the phone being better, the service is also cheaper - the basic service is $20 per month, so it’s half the cost of the Iridium service.

This convinced me to get one. In July 2010, you can find brand new ones for around $500.

My quick testing shows that it performs well, though as I’ll only ever be in the footprint of one satellite (and you get the best service if you point the antenna at the satellite - so you need to have a general idea of where it is), the coverage in more challenging areas (canyons, forest, etc.) may not be as good as the Iridium network.

Out of the box it comes with the ability to send both SMS messages and emails, and has a built-in (Navstar) GPS, from which you can email position data (a fantastic feature from a safety and security perspective). Sending and receiving both SMS messages and emails is speedy, with a delay of just a few seconds between sending and receiving.

In summary the IsatPhone Pro is better, faster and cheaper than the Iridium/Motorola 9505. I’m liking it so far, and I think it’ll make satellite phone ownership available to more people.

Recommended. Field testing from Central America coming up soon!

G. I. Meijer of IBM Research in Switzerland recently published an engineering paper called “Cooling Energy-Hungry Data Centers”, you can read the abstract here, and you can read the whole article if you’re a AAAS member.

He makes a great argument for liquid cooling in the data center, something I’ve been an advocate for a long time. It boils down (ha!) to something simple:

Heat capacity of air: 1 MJ m^–3 K^–1 Heat capacity of water: 4 MJ m^–3 K^–1

Clearly, the heat capacity of water, and other liquids, is far greater than air.

Interestingly, he’s not just talking about re-engineered cabinets which use liquid cooling to cool the air before and after it has been ducted through hardware, which certainly helps and while it isn’t common it isn’t rare, but rather he advocated the use of microfluidic heat sinks (using microchannel heat sinks and liquid cooling) at the transistor level to alleviate the heat issues caused by leakage currents at the gate oxide (we currently loose more in leakage currents than are consumed by computation). As we move from 45 nm through 32 nm to 22 nm packages in the next few years, this issue will accelerate - thermodynamics is still your daddy.

He estimates that using cooling water at 60C-70C will protect the microprocessors from overheating, and alleviate the need for chillers to operate at the extent they do today (or at all at certain times of year, probably depending on your local environments ambient temperature and humidity) - with a 50% reduction in data center energy consumption. A second benefit is that collection of the waste heat becomes easier, with applications in office and district heating and some industrial applications.

Anything we can do to reduce the 330 TW·h of energy in data centers globally (2009 estimate) is a good thing, right?

Science 16 April 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5976, pp. 318 - 319 DOI: 10.1126/science.1182769

I’ve been an “overland” traveler for way over a decade, and simply an avid traveler all of my life. There are a number of reasons for this, and as I see more places and interact with more people whose backgrounds are very different to mine I can feel my reasons for traveling are slowly changing (that’s a whole other story). Although I love my Land Rovers (I refer to them as “pets”), and I’m a fully-fledged tech-guy, both the vehicles and the technology are simply enablers for me to travel to the places I want to go, experience them in many different ways and to communicate from them and tell stories about the people and places when I return home.

This time, I’m just back from the 2nd Overland Expo. What a great event! Even though I was involved in the 1st Expo and was asked at that event to present and do some driver training this year (by Graham Jackson of Overland Training), it wasn’t until I rolled into the event that I fully understood the scale. It eclipsed last years event in many ways, many more vendors, better training facilities, much better rooms for AV presentations, a knockout team of staff, instructors and presenters and finally a fantastic audience of folks who love to travel. I couldn’t believe how many great vehicles were parked in the car park.

It’s not really about the vehicles though. I know a great many of us enjoy building them, tinkering with them and driving them, but really they are just another companion on the journey. A great many of the vendors realize this (and they realize we spoil them), and are on-hand to help us do this. My personal favorite piece of vehicle kit was the Kaiser / Nekarth Differential Locker, a much simpler and more elegant approach to locking differentials than the Detroit and ARB solutions. I saw this demo at the Expeditioneers booth.

The Expo is not just about the vehicles (and they ranged from pedal-bikes, through motorbikes, regular 4x4 vehicles to huge ex-military and custom built behemoths) and their parts and accessories. Other vendors offered medical equipment and training (and Remote Medical International staged some great demos), guiding services (notably No Limit Expeditions offering adventures in Belize and the rest of Central America and Safari Drive based in various African locations), clothing (including one of my favorites, Mountain Khakis - recommended!), tents (roof-top and otherwise), all sorts of camping/expedition gear (including Bug Out Bagz), the list is long and distinguished.

Seminars and presentations are a key part of the Expo, and if you just attend one or two of them you would realize that “overlanding” isn’t just 4x4 driving - and very different from what usually pops into peoples minds when the outdoors and 4x4 drivers meet… I talked about staying online and in touch while on an international overland trip, and driving through the Sahara in a VW Golf! Other presentations and panels discussed medical responses, overlanding with dogs, solo overlanding, cooking demos (very popular I understand), and some great overland movies courtesy of Austin Vince and the Adventure Travel Film Festival.

Groups and clubs are also prominent at the Expo. It’s always great to see the Disabled Explorers and their WAVE Sportsmobile, really giving folks the opportunity to get out and explore who normally may not have the chance to. I love the ideas behind both the Carbon Neutral Expedition and the Vanishing America Project (Overland Society’s Expedition Flag ambassador for 2009), and again, the Muskoka Foundation is making a difference around the world.

My favorite part is the opportunity to see old friends and meet new ones. One moment sticks in my mind, during a basic vehicle overview session I was one of the instructors. After the other instructors had said their piece, I was my turn to add something. Trouble was, three of the instructors were Tom Collins, Duncan Barbour and Jim West, 3 Camel Trophy luminaries, and a hard act to follow! Having the opportunity to talk to people like this is wonderful - and the chance is there for everyone who attends, especially at the ever-popular happy hours each evening! I particularly enjoy spreading the word, or “preaching the gospel of travel”, as a friend once told me. I think retelling great stories and sharing experiences really gets people fired up for that first trip. Helping them over the “well, it’s a dream I’ve always had, but I just can’t get the time off work” is usually the first part, and not that difficult in the environment the Expo creates.

Once people have traveled off the beaten track they come back home with new eyes, none more so than Americans (not a dig, just an observation). Through their new eyes they see people, politics and the Earth in a different light. A more tolerant, understanding and sympathetic light. An ability to put themselves in the other persons shoes and see that there are many more sides to national and international issues than you’ll ever see on the typical “never mind the quality, just look at the quantity” news channel (which is why I refuse to watch television news - that’s another story). Anything which opens peoples minds and makes for a more tolerant and understanding society clearly should be encouraged; I’ve always advocated international travel for this purpose and the Overland Expo is the ideal platform to encourage people to embrace this.

Note: I only use this type of stove when camping out of my Land Rovers. When hiking or backpacking, I use small and lightweight stoves like the MSR PocketRocket. When on the motorbike, I use an MSR DragonFly, so I can use the petrol from the bike and utilize a single fuel source.

I’ve been a JetBoil fan since they became available in 2001. When camping, my cooking philosophy is “just get it done’, nothing complex, usually something I’ve pre-made or something out of a packet (I actually like MREs, usually warmed on the manifold). And being English, I mandate several tea-breaks throughout the day, so really I just need a fast and efficient way of boiling water. That covers about 90% of my cooking requirements.

One of my more lightly-used JetBoils failed recently (a JetBoil PCS - Personal Cooking System). The seam attaching the inner part to the outer part (which interfaces with the burner) broke away. I noticed that it was spot welded and the newer JetBoils have an updated design - so they clearly know about this issue. I took it back to REI to get it replaced and while in the stove section I had a longer look at the MSR Reactor, clearly their answer to the very successful JetBoil. It’s of a similar design, slightly wider and the burner interface section has a number of fins which gives the pot a larger surface area and speeds up heating. The burner itself is very large, in terms of area (but quite compact), and is quite quiet in operation.

On a recent camping trip in Utah, I had the opportunity to give the stove a decent field-test. Of course, I boiled water for tea and washing, I boiled milk for porridge (Mornflake Lyle’s Golden Syrup flavour - imported from the UK), which is rather messy, I made soup, warmed some pre-cooked steak and cooked-up some pasta. I noted the following pros and cons.

Pros:

1.  It's extremely fast, I boil a lot of water so this is a huge win for me. Subjectively, it takes around 1/3 less time to boil water versus the JetBoil. This is due to the more powerful burner and larger surface area on the burner interface.
2.  It packs small, and as it's wider than a JetBoil, you can pack a 220g (7.8oz) gas cylinder inside it, whereas the JetBoil can only contain a 110g (3.9oz) cylinder internally (so I always packed an additional large 450g (15.9oz) cylinder).
3.  It comes with a small packing cloth which stops the insides getting scratched when the burner unit is packed inside (yes, you could easily make this yourself, but it's a nice thought to provide one).
4.  The whole unit it the typical good quality you'd expect from MSR.
5.  It's wider than the JetBoil, and that makes it easier to clean.

Cons:

1.  It's more expensive than the JetBoil ($160 vs $100 using REI prices in April 2010).
2.  Simmering is difficult, if not impossible. The burner is so powerful it seems to have only two settings, off and "supernova"!
3.  No <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezo_ignition">piezo ignition</a>! It's a pain to use matches or a lighter.
4.  Bigger burner means it goes through gas faster, though as you can pack a larger cylinder internally it may not be an issue.
5.  It is slightly larger than the JetBoil, the diameter is larger but it is shorter.
6.  It has a fold-out handle, the JetBoil is insulated so you can simply pick it up with your bare hands even when hot.
7.  As the diameter of the pot is wider than the JetBoil, it is slightly more difficult to pour into narrow containers.

In summary, I like the Reactor, I doubt anything on the market can boil water as fast. However, until it adds both piezo ignition and a way to simmer I still recommend the JetBoil (especially as the Reactor currently demands a $60 premium).

I’m happy that I’ve managed to get my Icom IC-2820 radio and Kenwood RC-D710 TNC/data terminal to work together so I can now use the “left side” of the 2820 for APRS on 144.39 MHz and use the “right side” for D-STAR and conventional voice communications. This configuration passes GPS data from the GPS in the IC-2820 to the RC-D710 which in turn sends back APRS data which is transmitted by the 2820. I’ve also upgraded the GPS antenna to a waterproof active antenna from Gilsson (#MCX180) which has a straight through MCX connector and fits, with a little trimming.

To do this, you’ll need the following (if you’re not making your own cables):

• Icom IC-2820 D-STAR radio
• Kenwood RC-D710 TNC/data terminal/control panel
• Kenwood PG-5J interface kit for RC-D710
• Kenwood PG-5G programming cable (to connect to a PC running Windows)
• Kenwood MCP-2A, “Memory Control Program” software (a free download)
• A PC running Windows for the MCP-2A software
• 6-pin mini-DIN cable that comes with the PG-5J
• A data cable with 2 mini-stereo jack plugs (the RC-D710 came with such a cable, but with only one jack plug)

After the usual preparation (checking items, installing powerpole connectors on the power cable, etc.) I powered off the radio and TNC, and connected the 6-pin mini-DIN cable from the main unit of the 2820 to the “data” socket on the PG-5J interface unit. I then connected the RJ-45 cable between the PG-5J and the RC-D710 panel. Finally, I had to connect the mini-stereo jack cable from the RC-D710 panel to the main unit of the 2820. I assumed that there would be a mini-jack at each end of the cable, but, no! Fortunately, I had two of these cables and I chose to connect them together. It’s a very small cable, with what seems like 3 strands of very thin copper in 3 cores (it’s a stereo cable). My soldering ability wasn’t up to the job, so I gave up and used a terminal block, which works nicely for testing (I’ve ordered a 10ft ready-made cable from Monoprice).

Next, I connected the RC-D710 to my PC and upgraded the firmware (it was v1.x and v2.01 is current), and then used the MCP-2A software to read the default config. This software is the only way to change the configuration elements on the RC-D710. I upped the levels as described in this article, viewed the other configuration items and set my callsign info, as well as some custom messages, setup smartbeaconing, etc. and on the IC-2820 I made sure in the data function that “G-D” was on (this sends GPS data via the stereo data cable to the D710), and in the menus (GPS sentence) I set RMA and GGA to on. In the packet menu, I set the packet operation band to “left” so the APRS data will only transmit on the band I have set to 144.39 MHz.

I feel I’ve only just scratched the surface, and will experiment a little more to optimise the configuration, but my first impression is that this will prove to be a great setup.

24 hours after posting about my problems re-registering and updating maps on my Garmin StreetPilot 7500, they have fixed my problem, I confess I dug my heels in a bit, sending them an email reminding them how I use their products, how long I’ve used them for (since 1995), how much I’ve spend and how many times I’ve recommend people buy Garmin for their good quality products and great customer support.

Anyway, I got an email from them saying that they’ve registered the device for me and they also threw in a free upgrade to City Navigator North America NT 2010, which is great, and that’s what started this thing in the first place.

So, while a little slower than usual, Garmin support came through again. Thank-you Garmin, I shall continue to recommend your products!

I’m trying to spend some money with Garmin, but they won’t let me.

I’m a fan of Garmin GPS receivers, particularly devices like the GPSMap 478, a wonderful chart-plotting GPS. I also have a StreetPilot 7500, a nice large-screen GPS that I use in the truck. I’ve spend thousands on Garmin hardware and maps since my first Garmin device, a GPS 12, back in 1995. If you count the devices I’ve bought for others and my referrals that total is well north of $10,000.

A while ago, maybe in mid-late 2007, Garmin updated their internal systems at my.garmin.com. I had multiple GPSes registered with them, including the StreetPilot 7500. The old system was never brilliant, I blame the DRM they have around the mapping data, but that’s another subject…

Anyway, I want to upgrade the 7500 to the latest version of City Navigator North America NT, the 2009 update. To unlock the maps, you have to have a registered device. During Garmins update to my.garmin.com my previously registered 7500 disappeared. Now, when I try to register it again my.garmin.com rejects my serial number.

I’ve been extremely happy with Garmin support through the years, in fact they managed to next day me a replacement mapping CDROM when I was out of the country, starting trans-Sahara trip, to replace a damaged disk. They have been pretty responsive so far with my registration problem, until I received this today (the issue had been passed to their IT department)

We have contacted our IT department and requested another update. To answer your questions:

We have stressed the importance of getting this matter resolved and I am hopeful that we can get this matter resolved quickly. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

As this issue has been outstanding for 3 weeks, I’d love to know what the “IT Department” are doing. The very phrase makes my blood run cold, and I’m in IT guy! Some transparency would be greatly appreciated.

Ideally, I’d like to know what IT have done in the 2 weeks since they received this ticket from their support guys, what they are planning to do and why they can’t escalate it.

Remember, all I want to do is give them about $100 for new maps. All I need is a valid serial number.

I hope I don’t have to start buying and recommending other brands if they can’t resolve this. If anyone from Garmin feels like helping, the case number is KMM12787676I15977L0KM. Thanks!