Iridium GO! exec™ Mobile Satellite Internet WI-FI Hotspot

Yes, the Iridium GO! exec does not have any tracking features on its own.

The Iridium GO! exec uses a different type of SIM card, made for the Iridium GO! exec. It comes with a Sim card. The good thing is that is can be activated and deactivated, so you only need the one.

200mm x 200mm x 30mm. It weighs 1.2KG

The Iridium GO! exec is powered from a USB-C connector, and comes with a USB-C, 5 Volt, 3 amp power adaptor. It doesn't use that much power for transmit, though. It is around 15 Watts on transmit/receive and 5 watts standby. It can be powered from a 2 amp USB outlet also, if you already have one on the boat.

The Iridium GO! exec has a built-in battery, different to the Iridium GO. It is not user replaceable. Needs to be sent to Iridium for replacement.

The external antenna is spec'd for Certus 100, it has different internals, but looks the same as the Iridium GO!'s. The cable is 5 Meters long, so we recommend mounting the Iridium GO! exec aft in the boat, closer to the push pit, if that's where the external antenna is mounted. We don't recommend extending beyond 5 meters with the LMR400 cable, as this is the length specified by Iridium.

Yes, it has a speaker, and can be used on its own for calls, or with the App.

Yes, it has an Ethernet port you can connect to a computer or router.

GPS tracking is done by the DataHub connected to the Iridium GO! exec. It talks to the Iridium GO! exec and brings up a connection, sends the tiny tracking data packets, then turns off the connection. Tracking is set to hourly by default on the DataHub, but you can change it. The data is counted in your plan for tracking. With the GO! exec 50 plan for example at $159.95 per month having 50MB data. One typical weather download is 200kb, so 10 weather downloads is 2MB. When considering they take seconds rather than 20 minutes with the Iridium GO!, its a real game changer.

The amount of data for one position report is 200 bytes. The minimum charged billing increments for a connection is 5kb So for just tracking, 30 days on hourly tracking will use 3.6 MB. This can be changed in the settings to collect position reports every hour or 15 minutes, and send them each 4 hours for example. You can also use the DataHub to check for mail every hour, and send the tracking reports at the same time to efficiently use the 5kb minimum billing increment.

The Iridium GO! exec has a Certus 100 modem in it, this is the slowest Certus connection. Download speeds are up to 88 kbps, upload speeds are up to 22kbps.

The unused data does not roll over, unfortunately. You get alerts when you reach different percentages of your limit. If you go over, you are charged per MB. We are still waiting on the details of those numbers yet, it will likely be close to US $10 per MB.

There will always be a place for the Iridium GO!. Because of the price point of the unlimited plan for the Iridium GO!, some people will always be happy to wait, and know how much it will cost them for the month. We don't see it being ended any time soon.

We don't recommend extending beyond 5 meters, as this is the length specified by Iridium.

Yes, there is a built-in GPS for the SOS function.

It has 6 hours talk time and 20 hours standby

There is no other way.

The Iridium GO! exec has its own built in firewalls to block background traffic. When you want to use an App like PredictWind to download a weather forecast, in the downloads section of the Offshore App, when you select "Download" it will tell the Iridium GO! exec to connect and just download the PredictWind info, blocking all other traffic for that session, then it disconnects. If you want to open a webpage, you can choose the web profile, and data will be limited to the browsers you have running. GO! exec aware apps set firewall rules that only allow them to use the internet. Users can create custom firewall profiles for apps that do not have link control built into them. The firewall rules can be defined either with the GO! exec App and/or using the DataHub. When connecting to the internet using the GO! exec App, users can select either predefined system profiles or user defined profiles. Only apps meeting the firewall rules defined by the profile can access the internet. The same is true when manually starting a session using the GO! exec user interface elements in the DataHub If using Quick Books or Quicken Apps for example, users would need to know what ports and web addresses to open, they must know the ports and hostnames to block everything but that App in a custom profile. This information is usually quite easy to find on the internet when setting up the system. Otherwise users would have to use the open all profile.