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I am a member of the Ardingly Solar Team, a group of students designing and building a solar powered car to race in Australia in the world solar car challenge. I have designed a system that collects all data from the cars BMS and motor controllers and broadcasts it using RF radio signals to a service car at the back but now we would also like to be able to send this data on to a website to be displayed. the problem is WiFi is not really an option as the race is through the Australian outback and GSM is not going to work either as the signal does not reach that far into the outback, so the question is has anyone ever tried using satellite to transfer data or is that too much and there is a simpler way of doing this? We need the data in real time so collecting it at the end is also not an option.

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    Without knowing even the rough data volumes we will struggle to answer this. It would probably also be worth knowing what sort of budget you have as satellite data services tend to be expensive.
    – hardillb
    Nov 25, 2018 at 20:59
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    Just search this site for “satellite”, or maybe [this question]( iot.stackexchange.com/questions/2433/…) will help? I would imagine that you would only be sending lat/long, possibly also speed, with each data packet. How often do you need to send them? Maybe once a minute? Or even less frequently? Without more detail, we can’t say for sure, but a satellite device will set you back between US 5150 and $500, with data probably less than $50 per mon6th.
    – Mawg says reinstate Monica
    Nov 26, 2018 at 9:01
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    LoRaWAN is not going to work without deploying a bunch of gateways (there won't be any in the outback) along the route and these would then require backhaul (again none in the outback). The distances they will be covering will be 100s of KM with no external coverage. Satellite is the only option, the question is going to be how much it will cost.
    – hardillb
    Nov 26, 2018 at 14:46
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    as per @Mawg comment ...... maybe you could try approaching the satellite service provider for sponsoring or for a loan of the device ...... iot.stackexchange.com/questions/2621/…
    – jsotola
    Nov 26, 2018 at 22:37
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    Please Edit the question to add more detail
    – hardillb
    Nov 28, 2018 at 8:42

1 Answer 1

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If it's just 8 bytes every 30mins then one of the short message services will probably be good enough (no need for a full on IP connection). e.g. Rock7 RockBLOCK.

Also see this answer for rough pricing details

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