I’ve been in contact with the company that provides the UK & rest of the world SMS number regarding some SMS delivery issues and while there put another “shilling in the meter” (i.e. $20 credit) I had a look at the usage stats whilst on the website and was surprised at the usage level.
The table below lists how many inbound SMS I have received for each month so far this year
Jan 138
Feb 127
Mar 195
Apr 250
May 339
Jun 403
Jul 218
Aug 253
The total so far is 1923. The 1st 3 days of September have had 24 SMS so far. The cost of this is well within the $2 / month I expected and the uptime/reliability has far exceeded what I was seeing when I was using a GSM dongle connected to a computer here in the shack. Another cloud/virtualisation success story!
Hi Andy,
The SMS process certainly works. I use it only as a means of last resort, when I have become bored of calling CQ or getting cold!
The only improvement I could hope for is a “ping” to say it has been posted on the spots page.
It’s quite straightforward to add outbound messaging. The distasteful issue of who pays for the messages needs to be resolved.
It’s low priority however, as some big DB updates are in hand. We’ve been able to use “mon & pop store” sized hosting accounts for the last 12years but we’re getting to being a proper size now and work is under way to give us a solution that will last another 10 years.
Interesting stats, Andy, and thank you for providing the service. I’m not a heavy user, but would be happy to contribute to the running costs if that became necessary / possible.
