The first preparation for this walk was a weekend spent testing search and rescue comms gear. We used radios and mobile phones, but no sat phones. After this week, I think I know why. There are two sat phone networks available in Australia, one which is affordable and one used only by those with extreme government subsidies or a seven digit salary. It took half a week and a lot of preparation time going through various satellite phones to work out that they shared a common problem; all of them used the network I could afford to connect to for a month without selling my kidneys on the black market. This didn't seem like a problem at the time, but the biggest ones never do...
Half of my week's moving and preparation time was lost to attempting to connect various satellite phones before I gave up. Secondhand phones had been a mistake, I decided; it was time to cut my losses and try another tactic. Normally I wouldn't bother, but we do need to be able to coordinate with walkers meeting us halfway and drivers picking up those leaving before the end. All I really need to be able to do is let people know which campsite we've settled into each night, something a full satellite phone is over-qualified to do.
By this time, it was Thursday and I had only a few days left before the walk started on Monday. I found one GPS Messenger available for sale in Hobart, snatched it up on Friday morning and opened a satellite account. I set aside some of my remaining preparation and moving time to set it up and sent off my first test message. The lights flashed, acquiring GPS coordinates from one satellite network and then sending them through another. Twenty minutes passed and no sign of the message. I tried again with no luck, and then tried customer service, a mobile phone somewhere in Australia set to redirect to a call centre in the US.
Don't panic, it's just a calibration problem. All I had to do was restart it and leave it in the open for twenty minutes while it set itself up for the local satellite service. Seemed strange, but I gave it a try. Further trials yielded no results and the call centre had closed for the day. They were due to reopen at midnight, and I set about cleaning my old house until then.
Midnight came around and my call soon followed. The advice for fixing the problems grew steadily stranger and more inconvenient. Firstly I had to send a message in one location with clear view of the sky (a process that takes 20 minutes of waiting while it tries to connect) and then I had to move to a different location and try again within ten minutes. The flashing lights at both indicated the messages had been sent, though neither arrived at the phone in my pocket. So, after around an hour of jogging around at 1am and then sitting in the chill Tasmanian spring air, I returned to the house and called them again. Clearly my account settings were wrong. They checked them and lo and behold, I had put symbols in my contact phone number. For some crazy reason, I had thought +61 would precede the phone number! Oh, wait a minute... no after some explaining it was realised their computers had added this when I set my country. Matters didn't improve. After jumping through hoops for a while, even tracking down another set of lithium AAA batteries at 3am, I gave up and grabbed a couple of hours of sleep. Daylight makes everything better.
Satellite phones don't like daylight as much as I do, it would seem. Dawn did arrive, but it didn't bring any great wave of communication capabilities. Another conversation with the call centre and they decided my unit was faulty. No problems though, there was one I could swap it with in a store just over in Unley Road. I'd never heard of it but duly looked it up, only to discover the shop was actually in South Australia. Some careful explaining that I'm in Tasmania and this would be inconvenient clearly had no effect, as I was asked how long it would take me to drive to Unley Road. Why, no time at all. An hour in a car would get me there, getting out partway to take two flights.
"There's one in Devonport, how far away is that?"
Why, that would only take four hours to drive there, a couple of days to wait around until they were open and four hours to drive back. Easy!
"How long are you staying in Tasmania?"
I live here, which is why my account's address is in Tasmania.
"How far is it for you to drive to Adelaide?"
I gave up around then; clearly there's something incomprehensible about Australian geography and our blatant refusal to drive cars on water. I took to the internet, seeking a solution in its depths. Lo and behold, I found it. The problem isn't the device (although the pattern of indicator lights do indicate that it's faulty). The problem is that Tasmania is just too far south for satellite coverage.
That's right, the satellite phone network (advertised as covering another hundred kilometres or so south of Tasmania), actually falls short. Occasional bursts of signal make it through but nothing that the Spot's tiny antenna can use, nor (from what I've observed this past week) anything usable by a more conventional satellite phone to send a two character text message. So next time a mainlander tells me (as is their wont) that Tasmanians have no concept of large distances or being isolated, I'll just ask them whether any of the mainland is so remote that it's out of range of a worldwide satellite communication network*.
So, how are we going to communicate? There's dodgy reception on a few mountain peaks approaching the meeting points and that'll have to do us. Connectivity is intermittent, but is enough for sending an SMS. I never thought I'd say this, but it turns out that (in Tasmania at least) Telstra's restricted GSM network has better coverage than satellites. Considering how bad the GSM network in Tasmania is, that's really saying something about the satellites.
*Yes, I have been waiting years for a suitable response to this comment, frequently used by a few mainlanders I know. Though if any of them read this blog, they probably won't say it again.
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