My wife is going to a Search and Rescue training again this year in Appomattox, Virginia. Apparently Cell coverage sucks in this area. Anyone have any experience with rental sat phone companies? Or Maybe know of a cell company that works?

Tnx

For a cell phone based solution, check with Verizon. They are very prevalent in the Virginia area, and may have the best coverage.

Ensure the phone is 2G and 3G compatible, and that the user can manually select 2G or 3G. Many 3G phones will continue to search for a 3G signal (that isn't always available in rural areas), even though there is a perfectly strong 2G signal available.
This then causes the phone to have no signal.

Manually selecting 2G will also increase battery life, as the 2G radio inside the phone uses less juice.

As to renting a SAT phone, I have no experience.

Or just get a phone that still has analog service.

I can't imagine coverage in town to be that bad. And I never understand why folks expect cells to work in rural areas - the whole point of "undeveloped wilderness" is to keep it undeveloped.

But, yeah, Verizon seems best here. Haven't seen Sprint, a bit of Tmobile and AT&T, none of those tiny Midwest cell companies.

a buddy rented a SAT phone from an outfitter when we went on a wilderness canoe trip a few years ago, it was $11 a day and $3 a minute.to get it to really work we had to stand away from the trees and out on open rock by the lake side.we just used it once halfway thru the trip to contact our family's.

They are in town once during the week she is there. They have a hard line at the camp. It's just nice to be able to talk to each other once a day for a couple of minutes type of thing.

I'm working on trying to make contact with the local ham's to see if they have a repeater with IRLP that covers the camp as well.

When she went last year her ATT phone didn't work unless she was in the town or drove about 3 miles out of camp.

I'll look into the verizon solution as well.

IMHO, Iridium is the only sat service provider worth considering. Globalstar (from what I know) still has issues with their service.

I have used www.allroadcommunication.com and www.877whenever.com 877 has the edge on pricing and both offer the same equipment 9555, 9505a, or 9500. The 9500 will have the best price.

Was AMPS defunct in 2008?

I've rented sat phones for camping trips to Death Valley over Thanksgiving weekends. I used to rent Qualcomm's phone, but they used the Globalstar satellite system was apparently disrupted by radiation damage; check before you use a phone on Globalstar. Iridium continues to work fine.

See my delicious list of satphone companies at
http://delicious.com/philip/satphone

You can rent by day, week, or month, but companies play with their shipping charges to make the costs hard to determine. Sometimes companies have a higher weekly rate by include free shipping, and the companies with lower rates charge you high shipping that makes the total cost higher than the higher weekly rate. If you get my drift. You also may find that the weekly rate is lower, but the per-minute charge is higher, so having an estimate of minutes in use is handy, maybe necessary depending on your budget constraints.

Death Valley has no trees, so we never had connection problems. I've made test calls in tree-shaded areas; since you don't really know where the satellite is, you can know whether a tree will block the call till you try.

There may be a delay when you stop and the person answers, like you see on those TV news broadcasts with the satellite delay.

Per-minute charges, last I checked, ranged from a dollar to two dollars.