The Mailasail experience.

(I can not get it to work properly.)

Firstly, I will write this in english. This is because I have had a lot of support from Ed Wildgoose. Should he be confronted with what I have written, he will be able to understand directly.

I bought a used Iridium9555 satellite phone late autumn 2013, because it was then clear that my wife and I would probably get the chance to go cruising. With the 9555 I also bought a Redbox and a Wi-Fi Bat . The Redbox is a box with a firewall that controls connection to the internet in several pre-set ways. By using it one can be sure that for example only mails will come back and forth to the PC. A PC will usually be hard to control 100% concerning its use of internet. When the internet comes via satellite, every kB is important.

The Wi-Fi Bat is a long-distance wi-fi antenna. It has no place in the satellite phone internet setup.

Mailasail is interesting to sailors because of their mail compression solution and the automated mailborne weather responder (for GRIB’s and weather graphic files). By using this and a satellite phone a lot of sailors get or think they will get the bluewater weather information source that they need.

Ed likes to state that most people buy the compression solution to speed up their internet traffic, and not for the satellite and weather solution. I know that a lot of sailors are after the weather info via satellite, and Ed himself goes to Las Palmas before the start of the ARC to support  the product  used in this way. They have a specific mail weather service and a GRIB selection program. I also find it strange that anyone nowadays would buy expensive mail compression solutions  to be used on normal internet. The capacity for most people most of the time is more than adequate for mail.

The Mailasail products are not cheap. Because half a year of access to compressed weather files cost £ 90, I do not find it resonable to buy the subscription way ahead of the time it will be used. On the other hand one has to test it out and find out how it works. So I subscribed August 24. About 1 month before the 5 day crossing to the Canary Islands, and 3 months before the really weather critical Atlantic crossing. The weather info proved to work nicely on standard internet via Wi-Fi. A lot of nice weather graphic files are available in addition to GRIB’s of desired size.

But the real reason for buying the email weather file compression solution was of course to use it with the satellite phone. The SIMcard and prepaid minutes for the Iridium is not cheap either. $ 835 (approximately NOK 6350) for a SIM of one year validity and 500 minutes airtime.

Ed does of course want everyone to buy the SIM early and start testing it out with their phone, emailsystem, and computer system. He does naturally not care too much about that it will cost you money. It will, and maybe more than is pleasant. It is obvious that one must activate the SIM a reasonable time before it is really needed, and some airtime must be used testing and learning. But what is reasonable?

From our discussions:

Stein:

I have acquired

the Mailasail system for safety reasons, and today I cannot get down

any GRIB at all.

Ed:
I hear you, but this is a common war cry from people with problems.  If it's so extremely safety critical then you must also heed our instructions to have it all thoroughly tested BEFORE you go to sea.  We will help you sort out this problem, but you must agree it would be dramatically easier and less of a problem if we were having these questions in Feb or June or Aug, not in November/December? 

We actually give lectures to sailors (mainly ARC to be sure) where we summarise the MOST IMPORTANT point is to get this stuff all tested well in advance.  Yet, every year we see a fraction of our customers go to sea without the equipment working, and without fail they are the ones who are most distressed... The only way we can solve this is to get you to flush out these problems BEFORE you set out on your ocean crossing.

(I activated my SIM and started testing September 10.)

If you activate your SIM in February and intend to be crossing the Atlantic at the end of November you will have used at least 75% of the validity time of the SIM on nothing. In my case validity time would be the most limiting as I would not expect to use the same proportion of the airtime. Cost of testing time:  $ 626 or NOK 4760. For a beginning of June activation you pay for virtually nothing : $ 417 or NOK 3175. «Virtually nothing?». Yes, I think that if this system needs this much testing time and a support function at the ARC, it should be alarming to potential users.   

From the above it is obvious that I have had a lot of problems. I still have. During the Atlantic crossing, I had to spend a lot of time and a lot of Iridium minutes to get down any GRIB’s at all. Some days I could get none. Really frustrating, as I have invested a lot in their products.

Ed Wildgoose has always answered to my complaints, and invested quite some time in trying to solve them. That is exemplary. But I still cannot get it to work reliably. Ed says a lot of people screw up the mailsetup. He has confirmed mine to be correct. He says the different computers can cause problems due to setup issues. But I use the Mailasail Redbox, and according to Ed, this solves this issue. Mailasail states that an external antenna is imperative for good performance. I bought the best one they have , and it is not cheap. So he says there must be a bad installation. I used the very thick cable that Mailasail provided with the antenna. Not cheap either. The antenna is placed on the davits, so not as high up as may be wished. But I have seen other systems demonstrated and working with an Iridium 9555 and the handset antenna only. Ed says I will have much better performance with a newer phone. Nothing was said about this when I bought my Mailasail products and subscription. On the contrary, there was a flashy video demonstrating how easy and fast the system is. (I can not find the video any more, maybe they removed it after I referred to it?)

Ed says that he can not be responsible for mailprograms and computer programs made by others. Still these products are a part of the final product for us sailors, the weather information. The Mailasail  weather products will not function without them, and if it is very complicated to have it all work together, the customers should be warned.  

Ed says about the median customer:

«They will typically spend 50+ minutes before they leave doing thorough testing. Probably also several ocean passages flushing out gremlins. Likely this is 50-200 mins of testing before they depart.»

200 minutes is 40% of a year/500min SIM.  (and equivalent to NOK 2500).

Should it be this difficult? 

The reader who has made it this far down is hereby warned. It may work beautifully at once. Or you may have a lot of trouble and expenses to make Mailasail work the way it should. If it ever does.





I have not written so much specifically about my own case, more I have elected to point out that there are many problems associated with getting the Mailasail system to work.
I thought I had everything right:

-The Iridium 9555. Nothing wrong said about it on the Mailasail site, but when I got problems Ed promoted the Iridium pilot.

-The Redbox. Ed stated that with this almost all error sources are cancelled, but I have it and I still cannot get reliable weather info.

-The AD-510-1 external Iridium antenna with a thick coax. An external antenna is according to Mailasail crucial to getting high enough signal quality to be able to use the internet in a meaningful way.

-The Live Mail e-mail account as recommended by Mailasail.

-The Mailasail e-mail compression service account.


Still my e-mail program usually cannot get through to the Mailasail server  within the 10 seconds limit before the redbox cuts the connection due to inactivity, even with a good signal displayed on the 9555. So I have to try to connect again. And again. The minutes pass and the £'s flow into the Mailasail bank account. Because, for some reason that is hard to think is fair, the Iridium seconds are deducted even if I am not able to get through to anything at all.

And the money is one side of the issue. Another is that some days I have had to give up getting a GRIB file at all.