Making Satellite Calls With A 1973 Telephone (And Inmarsat Mobile Terminal)

Voice phone calls are so last century... so lets see if we can make some with a 1973 handset, a DTMF keypad from the 1990s, and a satellite terminal from 2009. I tried giving @userscott a call in the UK and it worked great!

This is a Glocom (Hughes) GX-10, and uses the Inmarsat network of geostationary communication satellites. It has an array of helical antennas for L-band inside a small radome. I've been seeing a lot of Inmarsat equipment available lately for cheap / free. It seems to be going obsolete as Starlink and other modern providers take over the satellite communications market.

People sometimes confuse me with @peterfairlie2296, check out his channel for more satellite phone stuff!

Big thanks to an anonymous donor for sending me the Inmarsat terminal (you know who you are :-) )

Also huge thanks to my Patreon supporters & Youtube members for helping me make sound financial decisions like this. A SIM card for less than an hour of talk time and 5.5MB on a 15-year-old satellite phone was not cheap! Fortunately the service is still available, I'm not sure if cell phones from 15 years ago would even work today!

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