I live in California, where we have earthquakes and wildfires. And as you might guess, in an earthquake, communication becomes difficult. Cell towers are overloaded, traffic is frozen, and you get stuck. There are plenty of stories of people getting stuck for long periods of time at work during the Loma Prieta earthquakes, for example. As my wife and I had kids, things got more complex, because making a plan for finding where my wife is “right now” after a disaster strikes, and figuring out how to get the kids from school is difficult. We all have changing schedules, and it is hard to know where exactly everyone is at any given moment in time.

To combat this problem, we tried several ideas:

Walkie Talkies - Not even close to useful (for this use case). Range is way too short.
Ham Radio - I have a HAM license, but my wife does not, and Ham radios are not always the easiest to use if you don’t practice. And it was unreasonable to ask my wife to practice Ham radio.
A Published Schedule - The idea being some sort of a schedule where somehow we both knew where each other was all the time… This just didn’t fit our lifestyle, and was too error prone. Plus, it feels weird to try to know where other are all the time. My wife can live her life and do what she wants!
Pre-Planned Routes Home - The idea here is that we’d make sure each of us knew the route the other would take home from different places. We do this, but again, not perfect.
A Cell Phone linked Communicator - Something like an Iridium ZOLEO. This could work, but isn’t as foolproof as a full blown Sat Phone. And it has more failure modes (phone could fail as well), and is more stuff to charge in an emergency.

Enter… the Satellite Phone

The idea of a Satellite phone is simple (not easy, mind you… but simple). The phone communicates with satellites orbiting the earth. Then, using that network, you can/should be able to make calls anywhere.

Satellites are not all the same, of course. Some are higher, or lower in orbit, and some are geo-synchronous (meaning they rotate around the earth at the same speed as the earth spins, so a given satellite “sits” over the same spot on earth) and some rotate around, flying over different parts of the earth at different times.

It gets kind of complicated, but the basic idea is that there are a whole bunch of satellites in LEO (Low Earth Orbit) that move around in such a way that there is virtually always one “overhead” anywhere in the world. Now, they have to be in low earth orbit (about 485 miles up counts as “low” when talking about satellites!) in order for a cell phone sized thing to reach them. If you want a satellite to “sit” overhead and not move around so it is ALWAYS overhead, that distance looks like like 22,000 miles…. which isn’t gonna get reached by a handheld battery powered thing. So to make sat phones work, you gotta have an array of satellites that move. Each Satellite is “overhead” for about 7 minutes (or so) and then the phone passes to the next one, and so on.

Below if a GIF showing how the satellites move (you need about 66 of them to cover the whole earth and always have a satellite overhead). Note I took that from Wikipedia, and it is NOT my image. Check the article on Iridium (which is a sat phone provider) out HERE. You can see anywhere there is yellow, you have ONE satellite overhead. And the orange means you have two, and so the system does a handoff.

Those satellites are each moving about 17,000 mph (!!) so they are each only overhead for a few minutes (usually 7 or so, according to my research, but I don’t know exactly). And each one goes over the north pole, and then loops around the south pole and back again. Each satellite takes about 100 minutes to go all the way around the earth (which is pretty mind boggling honestly).

Generally, communications are between satellites and your phone, but there are also ground stations (in the US, there’s one in Alaska and one in Arizona) which help as well. That’s important, because if I have an earthquake in CA, I want to make sure that I don’t have anything to rely on that is on the ground in California.

OK, so why Iridium?

Yes, there are other “Sat phone” networks (like Globalstar), but when you dig in to the details, those are much less reliable, much less durable, and more failure prone. The original Iridium company really was thoughtful, and spent 5B dollars in the late 90’s to put up an array of satellites that covered the WHOLE earth. They went bankrupt but all the satellites kept working, and then the company came back, and has maintained things and upgraded. Globalstar is cheaper, but for my purposes, Iridium is perfect.

Note… Iridium is the “network”. It isn’t a phone. In the same way that Verizon or ATT etc can be used with different phones, same deal here. Different phones and devices can access a given network. In this situation, network = Iridium or GlobalStar (and maybe Starlink, but that’s a little different).

What phone to get?

After researching, I chose to buy two phones (one for me and one for my wife) and chose the Iridium Extreme 9575. There are other phones that work on the Iridium network, but that was the most durable, and robust. You can see it below with the antenna extended. There’s also a slightly cheaper one (less rugged) called the Iridium 9555. But I went with the 9575. As far as I can tell, they are the same “guts” just one’s a little more burly and water and dust proof.

Where do you GET a Sat Phone?

I got mine from a company called “Roadpost”. At least it used to be called that. Recently they rebranded as BlueCosmo (I have no idea why, but the change seems to not have made anything bad happen). There appear to be other places to get them, but this is the only one I have direct experience with, so it is the only one I’ll recommend.

How does paying for it work?

Firstly, sat phone companies are not stupid. They know full well that most people don’t want to use them as every day devices, and they know that folks sorta just want them to sit in a bag until an emergency. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to pay for that. You kinda have two choices (this might vary, so check the plans available of course):

Choice 1: Buy a Sim card loaded with some minutes, and it is “use it or lose it” for a given time period. So, let’s say you buy 200 minutes and you have 3 months to use it. They send you a SIM, you activate it, and then you have 3 months to use the phone and then it stops working till you buy more minutes. This makes sense if you are going on some sort of deployment overseas, or some place like an oil platform or something where you need this. You just buy what you need and that’s it. No monthly fee.

Choice 2: Monthly Fee for low minutes, with overages if you need it. This is a monthly cost (varies, of course) and you get some amount of minutes. Just like a normal cell phone plan. Every month, you get a refreshed amount of minutes, and you get no rollover. If you go over your allotted amount, you then pay a preset amount per minute (usually not a great deal). This is what I chose. I pay the lowest monthly amount I could find (I think I get 10 minutes a month) and figure that in a real emergency, I’ll be happy to pay the overage.

There are also ways to pool minutes across phones, as well as to pay a for a dedicated “land” number that normal people can call and it rings your sat phone (because the numbers to Sat phones are weird). You can see current (early 2025) plans here.

How does the Phone number work?

Sat phone networks can sort of be thought of as a separate “country.” Every country has a “country code”. The United States, for example, is +1 (convenient, that). There’s a full list of country codes here on wikipedia, but others include +44 (UK) +61 (Australia), etc.

The Iridium “country” code is 881. So, just like normal calling, to dial an Iridium phone from inside the US, you’d dial:

011 881 (XXX) YYY-ZZZZ

where 011 says “I am calling out of the US” 881 is the “I am dialing an Iridium phone” and the (XXX) YYY-ZZZZ is a normal phone number which is assigned to your phone. Similarly, if you wanted to dial an Iridium phone from outside the US, you’d do:

00 881 (XXX) YYY-ZZZZ

I hope that makes sense.

Can I text?

Yes, absolutely. You can text to and from a land cell phone just like any other phone. It will (of course) be “green bubble” and not a blue iMessage if you have an iPhone, but it works the same.

You can see in the image at the top of this page I am composing a text called “This is a Test.” Very creative, no?

Do you carry it around all the time?

One of the issues with something like a Sat phone is that you have to have it when you need it. For me, I just carry it with me at all times in my “work” bag (laptop bag). So it comes with me to work every day, and it is generally within a few feet of me, because I tend to have that bag with me kind of always. I also pack it on any international trip or any camping trip.

I pack mine with its charger, a spare battery, and a way to recharge it (and a battery pack to charge my phone as well). You can see my setup here:

All of the items in my Satellite Phone “kit”

Here’s the list of things in that photo (roughly from the top):

An Anker Power Bank (10,000mAh) - This one is cheap, sturdy, and has enough to easily charge the phone (or something else)

The Iridium Extreme 9575 - This is the phone itself

The charging “cradle” for the 9575 - Because the Iridium Extreme has a dust seal at the bottom, you have to have the little “cradle” to charge it. I actually kinda hate this, because it is fiddly, but the tradeoff is that the phone itself is quite dust and water resistant with it off.

Charging Cables

Spare Battery

Silent Pocket Faraday Bag - This is, of course, optional, but in case of Solar Flare, or some other bad EMP distruption, I appreciate having some protection. I guess there’s a little bit of debate about how satellites themselves far in an EMP (depends on the kind), but this felt like cheap (padded) protection for what was a sizable investment for myself and my family.

I hope all of this helped you learn a bit about Sat phones!

The Best Satellite Phone for Emergencies