The RAM windscreen mount has held firm over the roughest of terrain .
Coupled with a Beam Outback solar USB charger , your ZOLEO can run off grid indefinately .
NETWORK AVAILABILITY
As I have mentioned , ZOLEO uses the Iridium satellite phone network for all its communications . This consists of 66 active satellites in low earth orbit . This differs from other satellite phone networks which have as little as one satellite covering our part of the planet .
It means you should be able to access the network as long as you have some clear sky above you . I tried using the ZOLEO in a variety of locations and never once had any connection issues . It worked perfectly mounted to the windscreen , just sitting on the dashboard and even under the caravan awning .
BATTERY LIFE AND RECHARGING
Given ZOLEO is meant to be a portable , take-anywhere device , battery performance is critical . ZOLEO quotes the battery life as 200-plus hours and I haven ’ t seen anything in my testing that would suggest that is inaccurate .
I believe it would require the periodic message checking to be set to manual or , at least , to its longest setting of once every 60 minutes . I have had my ZOLEO set to periodic messaging every 12 minutes ( which is probably not necessary ) and left it powered on all day and the battery did not drop below 75 per cent state of charge .
I have recharged the ZOLEO from a wide variety of power sources , including our caravan ’ s USB ports , the ZOLEO car charger and our portable power pack , all without any issues . I ’ ve even used a Beam Outback portable USB solar panel , meaning I can use the ZOLEO completely off-grid almost indefinitely .
One thing to note : if you have the ZOLEO sitting in the sun or on your car ’ s dashboard and you try to recharge it , the internal battery protector may prevent charging if the unit gets too hot . It will automatically start recharging once the temperature has returned to safe levels .
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