Icom announces new satellite PTT radio on Iridium system, RoIP gateway

Icom recently announced the IC-SAT100, a handheld satellite push-to-talk (PTT) radio that leverages the Iridium satellite system to enable communications worldwide, according to a company official. Jim Backeland, executive vice president for Icom Canada and Icom America, said the IC-SAT100 will provide some unique characteristics to the PTT marketplace. “It’s a radio system, and you can simply think of Iridium satellites as towers that are 432 miles up in the air, where you talk virtually anywhere in the world—even pole to pole, if you wanted to,” Backeland said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications on the eve of the IWCE 2019 event in Las Vegas. “It’s a little bit different than anything else that’s out there right now. There’s the Iridium Extreme and there’s the Iridium Extreme PTT, which is a satellite phone that was modified for radio applications, but it didn’t exactly meet the requirement of what the users wanted as a radio, because it was a compromise of being a sat phone. What we’ve done is develop a true radio that will operate through that system, but it’s a radio only. You can’t do any satellite phone calls; it’s a one-to-many type of device.”

Backeland said the IC-SAT100 will provide very good voice quality—”just like talking on your cell phone now”—and will be more rugged than existing Iridium devices. “It will be a MIL-spec radio, and that’s one of the reasons we partnered with Iridium on this".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyP8WgnV3SU&t=2s