Communication Ideas

Post office as close as your nearest phone
    Communications costs were a large item in our  budget. We decided to have a “voice mail” system so friends and family could check our progress and leave a message if they wanted. Going through messages took much longer than we thought and was very expensive from other countries. We went over budget yet we still felt somewhat isolated.
Our Solution (letters can be written at your leisure and sent later. Incoming mail is held indefinitely)
    Our answer to our communications problem was the internet more precisely E-mail With a sub-notebook computer, modem (PCMCIA card preferred) and acoustic coupler you can access your mail just about anywhere in the world by dialing a local phone number.
Internet brings cultures together
    We had an interesting problem. We were spending the winter in Paris on a boat. Our neighbor just bought a new laptop and his wife wanted  to E-mail her friends in China. To do this, she needs a program that will write Chinese characters. A Chinese tourist was admiring their boat and so they invited him aboard. He had a solution to her problem. She could download a translation program from a website in Singapore. He spoke Chinese and only knew Netscape. We had AOL, and a different browser, so he would describe what he needed in Chinese. She would translate into French for her husband and he would then translate into English for me. We managed to have the program downloading in about 15 minutes. Ah, the power of the internet to bring cultures and languages together for a common purpose.
Connecting to E-mail while away
    Communications costs were a large item in our  budget. We decided to have a “voice mail” system so friends and family could check our progress and leave a message if they wanted. Going through messages took much longer than we thought and was very expensive from other countries. We went over budget yet we still felt somewhat isolated.
Finding an Internet Provider
    Find an internet provider that can provide gateways throughout the world. A gateway is a local phone number that you can call to gain access to the internet. Most large internet providers have gateways throughout the world. We chose America Online because they have a $4.99 per month plan that was perfect for our needs. You get three hours per month and then they bill you an hourly charge. If you are just connecting just for E-mail, you will find it difficult to go over three hours a month. Now we have a relatively low tech internet provider.
Trouble with foreign phones
    Foreign phones confused our new system. They often have another dial tone, it was like another language for the modem. The foreign payphones also didn’t understand the modem’s dialing tones. You can get around this problem by using the keypad on the payphone to dial. It is also a good idea to replace the phone number on the setup program and replace it with commas (,). A comma tells the modem to wait a while, in this case wait for us to dial. The second problem was the modem didn’t always recognize that there was a dial tone. A modem is normally programmed to wait for a dial tone before dialing. If it doesn’t hear the dial tone, it thinks it is a bad line and hangs up.  Again, we need to go into the setup program and make a change. In AOL you need to change the modem’s prefix command to ATX1DT. This tells the modem not to look for a dial tone. The modem will simply listen for the other modem’s tone and then perform the handshake. CompuServe is easier, they have a setup command for manual dialing. The newer international modems should avoid many of these problems.
Quality of connection - bad phones
    There is one last thing to keep in mind. Phone handsets will vary in quality. Most will take a pretty high speed as high as 28,800 bits/sec. You will come across some rather poor quality pay phones though. If you encounter one of these, change the setup to a lower speed like 2400 and it usually works, don’t do graphics. Another trick is to hit the handset against the payphone wall a couple times. No kidding, it helps loosen the carbon granules in the older handsets, and improves the sound.
Online resource
    Once online, you have access to a whole host of services like E-mail and the World Wide Web. We particularly enjoy downloading stock prices, news, sports and weather in English. You can even download satellite weather photos. I wanted to buy an engine part and the dealer here wanted a huge amount of money. No problem, get on the web, access a search engine like Yahoo, and search for a dealer in the US. It brought up a couple names that I could E-Mail and would ship the parts.
Communications budget
    Our communications budget went from over $200 down to less than $50 per month. Our costs on AOL never run over $20 even with their surcharge for foreign access. It runs around $10 just using E-Mail. Now if I could only get my mother and mother in law on the internet we could bring our communications costs down even more. Good luck.

Pocket Mail
Pocket organizer with built in acoustic coupler
    We have friends who have "Pocket Mail" by Sharp and swear by it.  It is a little pocket organizer with email capability and an acoustic coupler built in.  You use Sharp's Internet provider "pocketmail" for $10 per month.  You write your emails offline using the small attached keyboard and go to the nearest phone.  You then dial the gateway number, a US 800 number, then press send and it will automatically send and receive all your email messages.
    I watched my friend use it in the Netherlands and the call was cheaper than AOL via acoustic coupler because the connection was so fast.  I had a local Netherlands number and he had to call the US