Iridium Satellite Modem Supply

Description

Marine Systems Engineering (MSE) in the Met Office maintain a network automatic weather stations consisting of moored buoys in the North Atlantic Ocean, Light Vessels in the English Channel and Voluntary Observation Ships. This network was originally established in the 1990’s and remains a key component of our well characterised and high quality ‘reference’ capability, providing much valued observations for operational forecasting, climate monitoring and key calibration data for meteorological satellites. Marine Observation data is currently transmitted hourly over the Iridium Short Burst Data (SBD) satellite network using now obsolete Iridium 9522b SBD modems. Observations are limited to hourly due to the cost of Iridium satellite SBD data plans. The next generation of Iridium’s Satellite service and modems have been released in the last 2 years, with the monthly data costs of Iridium’s Certus 100 service being significantly cheaper per megabyte than the SBD network costs. Exploitation of the Certus Keywords: Iridium, Satellite, Marine Modems