These are my notes on how to use our Iridium 9555 satellite phone with Windows 7 - it may be of some use to others.
This assumes that you already have your sat phone and computer configured as described in Configuring a Sat Phone.
It's best to try with a normal (wi-fi) internet connection first and make sure that the emails from and to your sailamail account work.
Using a normal WIFI Internet Connection
1. In Outlook, the "Work Offline" button should be OFF.
2. The Teleport Mail firewall has to be set to "Unrestricted Internet" - otherwise it blocks the incoming mail for our private mail accounts, which use a non-standard port (1025).
3. Click Send/Receive button in Outlook. You should be able to send and receive emails on your personal email account(s) and the sailamail account.
Using a Satellite Connection
1. In Outlook, the "Work Offline" should be ON.
2. The Teleport Mail firewall has to be set to "Restrict to Web and Email Only". Otherwise you will get background programs grabbing the bandwidth...
3. Compose your weather email request and click "Send" - it will go into your Outbox.
4. Click the Send/Receive button in Outlook. The dial-up popup window will appear - click connect and wait. It takes 15-30 seconds to dial the iridium server and go through the password check. You will see your sat phone go into data connection mode. Outlook should then send and receive emails just on your sailamail account. It takes about 45 seconds in total to log in and send a SailDocs email.
5. Wait a couple of minutes to make sure that SailDocs has responded with your grib file.
6. Click the Send/Receive button in Outlook. The dial-up popup window will appear - click connect and wait. It takes 15-30 seconds to dial the iridium server and go through the password check. You will see your sat phone go into data connection mode. Outlook should then send and receive emails just on your sailamail account. It takes about 60-90 seconds in total to receive a 20K GRIB file as an email attachment.
Connection Problems
1. When I'm on-line with a decent internet connection, I've had problems sending attachments on my sailamail email address and found that if I bypass Sailamail's proxy email server, they get through. To do this, change the email server addresses in your Outlook Account settings to "mail.mailasail.com" and try again. Remember to change the server addresses back to 127.0.0.1 when finished (and don't try it when on a satellite connection).
2. Monitor the connection time. Sometimes the connection is not dropped when all the emails have been sent and received. Best thing to do is pull the USB cable out of the phone and reboot the laptop...
3. Make sure that the Outlook account properties for the yachtalba account have the connection set to "Connect using my Phone" - you don't have to change any other settings (leaving the email server addresses as 127.0.0.1 routes the email through sailamail's encryption server.)