Comment Re:What about military satellites (Score 1) 178
Also, Iridium was built for voice communications only. It will only get data support in a couple of years when they will literally send up a completely new full set of satellites.
Data has been sent via Iridium as a matter of course for years. I know from experience with floats and autonomous underwater vehicles that modems are commercially available and used every day. We got usable throughput on the order of a couple of hundred bits per second with a very unfavorable antenna location inches above the sea surface.
Here is such a modem.