Editor-in-Chief Peter Swanson interviews
Tim Johnson, director of Iridium Land
Mobile Business, to learn about the new
hot spot that turns your smartphone into
a satphone and more.
1. THE IRIDIUM GO: A COMPACT
SATELLITE WIFI HOTSPOT
PassageMaker: Let’s get right to the
product.
Tim Johnson: Basically what we’ve
got is a mobile satellite hotspot—a
very small device, a little bigger than a
pack of playing cards—to enable your
smartphone or tablet to make voice
calls, to let people do social media
... well outside the reach of cellular
providers.
PassageMaker: This sounds like a
terrific product for people who cruise
the Bahamas or anywhere outside the
coastal limits of the United States. One
question I do have, and I suppose you
were going to get to it: Do you retain
your own phone number when you
make these calls?
Johnson: You don’t. You’re going to
be using an Iridium app that’s installed
on your device dialing with the number
for the Iridium Go. Unfortunately it’s
technically a very challenging thing
to allow you to have your own phone
number.
PassageMaker: Funny how I homed
in on the only thing that you aren’t able
to do. Go ahead with the things you can
do.
Johnson: Iridium has been serving
the sailing community for a long time,
and there are a huge number of value-added developers out there who have
developed solutions for that market,
especially things like email applications
that use as little data as possible, SOS
applications, web applications. There’s
a whole suite of these applications
that can be easily ported over to GO,
including those from Android and the
iOS platforms.
PassageMaker: Will this also work
with a PC?
Johnson: It will. One of the big
intentions was to have an open
architecture that will allow this product
to be used by a wide variety of vertical
markets. … We went with an open
architecture and a tool kit that allows
partners to develop application needs of
their customers.
PassageMaker: Is OCENS among
those?
Johnson: They are.
PassageMaker: The PC version of
OCENS software would probably work
as is, right?
Johnson: There is probably something
they have to do to make it interact with
GO, but it’s probably not a whole lot of
heavy lifting.
PassageMaker: Have you got the
pricing for this hardware and service?
Johnson: The pricing is going to be
right in the neighborhood of $800 at
4 Game Changers
Electronics BY PETER SWANSON
Simrad, Iridium, Navionics and FLIR are launching new products that may well change how we navigate and communicate. On this page
we have the Iridium GO. Next we describe
Simrad’s entry, a forward-looking sonar
that is touted as a tool for cruisers. Then
Navionics offers its solution to the problem
of the disappearing magenta line on ICW
charts. And finally FLIR introduces a
$300 thermal imager that works with an
iPhone. Hate to use the phrase, but game
changers is what they are.
&AQ
Tim Johnson, director
of Iridium’s Land
Mobile division, tests
the new Iridium GO in
the field.
Iri
di
um
