[anigbrowl]

It's ideal for asset tracking - you can fit a GPS fix, timestamp, and accuracy estimate (based on # of satellites visible) into 12 bytes, which is enough to ping once per minute and still only use half your allocated bandwidth. If your asset tags call in every 5 minutes or once per hour lots of options open up.

2 way communications aren't much more demanding because most of what you need can be done with lookup tables, and there aren't that many different commands you would need to send to an asset tag for local scanning. If you want to do person-to-person, 2 bytes per word is sufficient for a fairly large vocabulary (especially a tightly specified one like military brevity codes) - not exactly chatty but sufficient for many operational/emergency purposes.

[mmazing]

It's not only bandwidth limited, it's message count as well.

The $60/yr plan allows for 750 _messages_ per month. Up to 3000 messages per month if you stack 4 plans together.

So on the base plan, you're limited to ~1 message per hour if you spread it out across the month.

[SergeAx]

> ~1 message per hour

How so? 6 messages per day is one message per 4 hours.

[cowsandmilk]

24 * 31 = 744, so one message per hour is just under the 750 limit. This is probably not a coincidence.

[happyopossum]

> which is enough to ping once per minute and still only use half your allocated bandwidth

Err, no - at 750 packets/month, you’d burn through your allocation in 12.5 hours at that rate.

[anigbrowl]

Sorry, I should have said record it once per minute and then upload less frequently (since each packet can be 192 bytes).