ive been working on a PIC SMS project to allow you to turn on and off lights in your home with text messages. the components used are a pic18f and the SIM300D gsm chip.
I was wondering if anyone knows of a chip similar to the GSM SIM300D except it works through satellite communication rather than GSM.
The PIC/GSM allows for home automation where cell phone reception is available, but for remote location vacation homes where cell phone reception is not available this is useless. Satellite would be a good alternative to know what is going on in your vacation home that you may only visit once or twice a year.
I don’t know of any satellite modules that would be easy to integrate - the Spot device is the cheapest commercial device on the market, and you can tell from their service plans that it’s not going to be cheap!
Quick question - do you have a source for the bare SIM300D modules in the US? I’ve only seen them on the Olimex dev board and from overseas distributors.
The iridium are two way while the Globalsat is one way. The iridium 9601 is sold in small quantities by Quake global for about $380/unit. NAL research has some interesting products too.