Originally Posted by
schnee
Can you leave now so people like me can actually learn what's out there, so when I do a bike tour in a place that makes my family *really* nervous, I can offer them a wide variety of options that I can use? I want to be able to contact them at a regular enough interval to put them at ease.
Because when I go bike touring in Africa in the next year or two,..
TIA.
When I traveled across Africa in 2013, I went through 10 countries and got 10 SIM cards. It took some experimentation, but I was able to get network over cell coverage in all 10 countries. When we stayed in lodges, internet itself was hit and miss. I am sure SPOT works in that environment.
However, TIA is also an abbreviation for "this is Africa" (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIA). I think it is also important to set realistic expectations. Cell connections might not be there, a SPOT could be lost or just not have battery charged up. Perhaps that little bit of information "spot on a map" might not be sufficient to let someone's imagination get satisfied if some other spot in Africa gets in the news (it is a big place, we saw some of the hysteria with the ebola epidemic had folks concerned about East Africa a world away).
So I also speak from experience that it is important to set realistic expectations of how frequently you might contact and the possibility of a technology failure along the way, so no news is not always bad news. In that way, I wouldn't set that "regular" interval to be some minimum, but instead some reasonable amount that accounts for TIA.
The other thing to recognize (may not help your worriers but true), is that if you do get into difficulties, their options to do something about it are fairly limited, particularly without their traveling to Africa.