No - I'm sure it's not the Bluetooth. Both laptop and PDA connect fine with BT. It might be the phone's GPRS modem - it's a old Nok 6310i - and it may not be good at coping with poor connections or delays. But it works fine in some places and hardly at all in others. From Volcano to the island of Salina and a very similar situation to Vibo. Hard to connect and the connection died after a few minutes. Iwas there 3 days and never got a connection good enough to read this forum. Thence to Panarea where I am now and it's fine.

I'll be in Greece next year. If this is likely to happen there on remote islands maybe I should abandon GPRS for 3G or something. Speed isn't important to me but when I want a forecast at 08.00 I want it then - not after an hour of fiddling about.

Richard - thanks for the useful information. I'll contact you off-list so this doesn't turn into a sailing forum.

[One thing on Bluetooth, though. If anyone knows how to use BT on a dual boot Linux/XP laptop where each OS has a separate link key without re-pairing, I'd like to know. Spoof the bdaddr? How?]

Dave

Can i ask what the reception was like in Panarea?

Do you get 3g or are we talking GPRS only?

Hoping to be able to get something good enough to work remotely, but then again i would be surprised if you could get anything on that rock. :)

On Lipari there's 3G HSDPA too, so there could be in Panarea too...

Awesome. Sounds promising then!

and thanks for the reply!