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Cho Oyu Summit - An Invalid Position?
19:57 p.m. EST Sep 27, 2004
It seems that not only the climbers have a problem to find the true summit of Cho Oyu – many of the Thuraya phones are losing their bearing as well. This is a cause of problems when sending home the summit images.
Everest summit – Nepal says Thuraya
Each Thuraya handset has a small built-in GPS unit. The GPS main purpose is to tell the Thuraya administration from which country a call is made. The information will among other things be used for billing.
When climbing Mount Everest from the South Side the Thuraya will show “Nepal” in the display. When climbing from North it will show “China”. At the summit it shows “Nepal”. So if climbing from North the phone will first show “China”, but somewhere close to the summit switch over to “Nepal”.
The Cho Oyu confusion
Most of the time the Thuraya seems to jump pretty well between the display of the Country, but not so on Cho Oyu this year. The problem seems to start somewhere around Camp 3, where the Thuraya stops saying it’s in China and instead displays “Invalid Position”. Why the phone doesn’t jump over to “Nepal” we (or Thuraya) have no answer to at this point.
The problems continue as climbers move back to Base Camp. It’s reported that the “Invalid Position” stays and/or that it switches back to “China” - in any case it's no longer possible to make data calls.
Earlier Thuraya problems
Last autumn, 2003, was a terrible season in sat phone perspective. First Thuraya activated its second satellite causing several communication problems. In October huge solar eruptions killed almost all sat communication for a couple of days and caused long term data problems for both Thuraya and Iridium.
Overall the Thuraya system has proven reliable however, and especially so considering it’s only three years since the service launched.
The Cho Oyu solution
When the display shows “invalid position”, the Thuraya handset needs a little help to fix the position. Try the following:
Menu>GPS Manager (8)>Current Position(1)
Wait up to several minutes. The Phone will search a new GPS fix and hopefully start working again.
You can quickly acquire position by hitting “Menu 81”.
At least one of the expeditions got their phone back to working order by following this instruction. We still don’t know if it would work at the summit itself.
Thuraya Support
Dial Thuraya Support direct form the phone for half the normal call cost (app. $0.5/m). The number from the handset is 100.
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