Starlink

Starlink is amazing.  My results are highly variable, with 150 mb down at the higher end, and 20 mb down at the lower end.  I think it's more affected by general usage in the area (since it's a shared resource) as opposed to visibility of satellites but I don't really know.  It's my backup internet.

Think of all the engineering that went into this thing:  reusable rockets; mass production of satellites that can maneuver themselves into position and have highly accurate phased array antennas; and my little dish, also with a phased array antenna that shoots a signal 350 miles into space!  That's twice the distance between Seattle, WA and Portland, OR.

I climbed up on the roof to install Dishy (as it is known) temporarily.

Later, thank goodness, I had it professionally mounted by the same person that installed our roof.

So far it's come through all the interesting weather we've had with flying colors.

If this blog post triggered you because you're mad at Elon, take comfort that SpaceX is run day-to-day by the COO Gwynne Shotwell who appears to be a genius, given the scope of SpaceX operations.

A colleague at work HB put me onto this real-time map of the 3,000 (-ish, as I write this) satellites is what convinced me to take a chance on Starlink.  

We live in an electromagnetic shadow, so cell towers don't work so great, like, at all, well, barely, so my T-Mobile backup internet kind of worked (and got my son through eight weeks of a remote trial where he was a juror), but it never worked during a power outage.  I suspect that cell towers go into a low power mode during an outage so they can provide minimal service for longer.

For Starlink, I'm genuinely lucky.  I wasn't supposed to get a dish until sometime in 2023 and it arrived in 2022.  And my base station ("internet gateway") is SpaceX satellite headquarters nearby in Redmond!  The Redmond office has ten or twelve radomes on the roof which I believe is ... a lot.