I have an external antenna and have been using the weathernet program from OCENS.  My understanding of doing 5 Bermuda races is that many people struggle with this set up.  On the other hand, my Sirius/XM has never failed. That is what has prompted the request.

us7070 wrote:

the iridium handset will work fine for downloading gribs offshore, if you follow best practices.
there is a fair bit written about this, if not on this forum, then over at sailing anarchy.
briefly:
1) you should have a good external antenna.., the puck car antenna is not good enough
2) get the gribs by email request from saildocs, or some similar service - this is free
3) use an email service and client like the one offered by xgate - this is not free
4) some use a redport optimizer with wifi - it makes the configuration a bit simpler
5) you can get weather graphics as well as gribs over email, but in either case, you need to make sure the file sizes are not too large - start with say 50kb or less, and see how it goes.