Star Talk

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Blink a few times, and then a few more, and the world will be smothered in signal; ubiquitous Internet and voice service is coming. Balloons, miniature satellites, and aerial drones will get us there. But not yet, not today. Even here in the United States, there are plenty of spots where a cellular signal is impossible to come by. That’s where GlobalStar’s Sat-Fi comes in. It lets you make calls and use the Internet from anywhere there’s sky.

The Sat-Fi is a satellite antenna that’s connected by a cable to a Wi-Fi router. It has apps for iOS, Android, Mac OS, and Windows that let you make voice calls, send emails (or even update your Twitter and Facebook accounts). It’s designed for areas where there is no network to connect to—4G, 3G, Edge, you name it. It’s really geared towards industrial use, but preppers take note, it would make a great emergency kit addition as well.

And here’s the thing: it works. If you need to send an email or make a call from way boonie nowhere, the Sat-Fi will connect you. Once I had it properly set up (more on that below) and had a clear shot at the sky, there was never an instance where I absolutely couldn’t connect.

A pair of Sat-Fi apps—one for voice, another for data—serve as your comms center. They jack into your phone’s address book and suck up your contacts—which is nice because you don’t have to manually plug in phone numbers or email addresses to get in touch with people. The email function is pretty basic, and takes some getting used to, because, for example, the “send” button on Android isn’t right in front of you. You actually have to go into the options. But it’s also solid in a way that you want something in the field to be. When you send and receive email, you can see the server connections, and you get a confirmation message so you know you were able to communicate. One nice touch? You can attach photos to your messages. These are dropped way down in resolution so the files are small enough to reasonably transmit and end up looking about like the phone cam pictures you took a decade ago. But they’re enough to get the point across.

I also thought it was kind of neat to be able to link up with Facebook and Twitter. While that may seem twee (hey, I’m tweeting from space!), when you consider one of Twitter’s best use cases is as a form of emergency communication—to tell the world about a fire or a flood or some other disaster when there are no other ways of getting the word out—it makes perfect sense that Sat-Fi included it. Similarly, it’s easy to see how the Facebook connection could be very handy to send updates to your friends and families when doing so would normally be impossible.

When everything is set up right, and conditions are good (meaning you’ve got a clear sky setup) it worked perfectly. Voice calls don’t exhibit noticeable lag. The internet connection just rolls data out and reels it back in again. At night under a wide open starry sky by the side of a lake, I had stellar voice quality that sounded about like a normal cell phone call. Yet on a heavily overcast day when I had the antenna in the shadow of a house, there was a noticeable lag of several seconds between the time I would say something and when it came through to the other caller.

The downside to everything running through the Sat Fi apps is that those apps are, frankly, ugly and a little confusing to set up and use. You’re going to have to RTFM. If you set everything up correctly, it works nearly flawlessly. But there are a lot of set up steps, and if you mess something up, it’s hard to tell what went wrong. My one hiccup, for example, was due to not selecting the right option in a drop down menu, and it kept me from making a data connection. It was an easy fix, but I couldn’t diagnose it myself because the interface just isn’t very intuitive. It all feels a bit industrial. And if someone is using this in an emergency type of situation, perhaps for the very first time, you want it to be easy.

But overall this is a really impressive product. It connects you with the rest of the world, where you previously could not. It’s a remarkable feat.