Satellite Communications Blog - Beyond Expectations | Pulsar

Your Iridium Handheld May Still Have the Incorrect Date/Time

Written by Kinley Paisley | Jul 1, 2014 1:42:00 PM


Does your Iridium satellite phone still show the wrong time, even though you thought you fixed the problem?

Iridium occasionally needs to reset its timers on the satellites - a process called re-epoching. They did this on June 17th, 2014.

The direct result of this, other than Iridium satellites having the correct time going forward, is that all Iridium handheld satellite phones suddenly start displaying the wrong date and time. 

There was a fix to this, but if you didn't get around to it your procrastination has paid off - Iridium just announced that they are "rolling back" the re-epoch.

This means that if you didn't do anything at all, and your date and time were looking wonky, they'll go back to looking normal again. 

If you went ahead and entered in the sequence of numbers necessary to change your date/time - we're sorry. You've got to go through a similar process to roll-back the time change. 

How to Roll-Back The Bad Date/Time On Your Phone

Those 9555/Iridium Extreme handsets that did enter the provided key sequence for the June 17th reepoch will be impacted on June 30th. They will need to enter the following key sequence:

• Dial *#99#2007030803502100#, press the green key and power cycle

Additionally, those 9505A handsets that manually changed the time/date setting will also need to follow the same instructions to update the date/time again on June 30th.

Will The Re-Epoch Happen Again? 

Yes. Iridium has to re-epoch their satellites every 2 to 3 years. There was apparently an issue this time around with compatibility for some of their services, so they've rolled back the re-epoch until that can be sorted out. They are tentatively planning to re-re-epoch in January, 2015.