Death Valley Off-Road Adventures

Yep. Kits supposed to ship "end of summer". I'm still on the fence about cancelling. The sky pollution mentioned above is one reason though I doubt any amount of cancellations will stop Elon. The other is the line of sight issue. I'm pretty sure I'll be fine but there are some large trees in my neighborhood. Being that it's still beta it's speeds are pretty impressive though. Elon's end goal is 1TB/S down speeds.

 

Lofty expectation. 1TB would let you surf the world's porn in nothing flat

 

Like it
Was just there

 

Truth. I must have been dreaming of 2078 when I typed that one. 1GB/s sound better? It's still plenty fast enough for 5K porn on every device in the house. lol

 

I waffled on sending a deposit. I'm not completely confident Starlink will be able to provide 24/7 coverage in our area.
Love the concept but I'll wait until it shakes out a little bit.

 

I'm really curious how switching will work.

 

Right! Talk about a lot of moving parts.....

 

Even their Dish 1.0 is an electrically steered phased array so it can quite easily track more than one satellite with high gain beams at the same time once there are enough satellites in orbit for it to be able to consistently see more than one. After that it's really not much different than how your phone hands off from one base station to the next (or more akin to how Iridium hands off from one satellite to another as unlike your phone that includes significant Doppler differences between the satellites, but still a pretty solved problem).

I feel the fundamental business side risk here is that the architecture will never support that many users at one time (cell sizes are quite large and can only support so many simultaneous users). For a good long while the only real market is rural folks without decent terrestrial support but that is solved many other ways that are cheaper than launching a massive satellite constellation and yet no one is bothering to do any of those already existing alternatives which suggests the rest of the market doesn't think the customers Starlink is trying to reach are actually economically worth pursuing.

It will be interesting to watch though as these things are hard to predict. Iridium famously fell on its face because way back when like many other players in telecom Motorola failed to realize that most developing nations would actually entirely skip wired telephony and jump straight (and very quickly) to cellular networks thus suddenly providing service to most of the areas Iridium hoped to compete in at far lower cost than Iridium could (not to mention terrestrial cellular usually still works indoors while satellite comms rarely do).

As to the light pollution at least they appear to be planning to stick with a lower orbit constellation which means fewer hours of the evening polluted (lower satellites spend more time in Earth's shadow).

 

I understand how the system works. I guess I view it much the same as Sirius and satellite TV. Neither one works particularly well.

Light pollution isn’t the big deal. It’s satellites ripping through a frame as astronomers work.

 

It's a big deal to me when I go out to special places for star gazing and the trains come through. As I said, I'm not a fan.

 

But it’s not light pollution in the normal sense. Like from a city or cars driving toward the telescope.

It’s reflected light that f’s up images with streaks. Even if they paint them with a non reflective surface, they will come across as dark streaks. Less noticeable. Either way, and as I said earlier, Elon doesn’t give a shit because we are not scientists in his eyes. And what happens when LEO is littered with this shit? Or when two or three more providers launch similar systems?

I see these as technology for technology’s sake. Why not install 5G towers instead? It’s the same way many countries skipped wired telephony all together.

 

Right on, all the better to not support it. It’s funny, the best places to go out there are those with no cellular service. That could be a great new travel guide, “Remote and Beautiful Places to Go with no Internet or Cell Service.”
But Damn you Starlink!!!
Now how am I going to get my teenager to put away her cell phone and be sociable when we’re traveling?! Besides, why bring all that junk on a get away from it all trip in the first place? OK, I’ll settle down now.

 

In theory a large LEO constellation can be far more reliable and robust due to the enormous path diversity available. Single path communications links like Sirius or various satellite TV services are subject to drops from fading. If you have more than one path (i.e. satellite) the probability of both fading at the same time becomes vanishingly small but obviously the system complexity increases. Starlink is going to be ridiculously diverse. Iridium uses just 66 satellites for global coverage. Starlink operating at the same altitude is planning 4000 so a given user is going to have many, many satellites simultaneously in view. Whether Starlink ever successfully exploits that diversity remains to be seen. Certainly at the moment it can't and thus user reports in beta indicate it is mostly unusable for anything that doesn't buffer (i.e. you can do Netflix but not Zoom).

Yes, as I'm married to an astronomer I'm aware . The term is confusing to be sure, but at present a significant fraction of the community is referring to reflected light from satellites as "light pollution":

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01238-3.pdf
https://aerospace.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/Koller-Thompson_LightPollution_20201026.pdf

Though some aren't, this past summer's AAS report never uses the term:

https://aas.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/SATCON1-Report.pdf

Agree. In fact the whole thing enabling Starlink is the fact that US broadband infrastructure is crap precisely because we don't treat it as a critical infrastructure like electricity or general telephony. The "problem" that Starlink is trying to solve has entirely been created by policy choices on the ground.

 

I'm pretty disappointed with how the network evolved but that's a pretty long conversation. I think Starlink is trying to solve the rural problem mostly because carriers no longer want to deal where they cannot make money-realistically, if telephony wasn't regulated, they probably wouldn't have phones at all.

And get ready for the connected battlefield. Raytheon will be building a satellite network to cover the earth...

 

As someone who lives in a rural area I know plenty of people who are very excited to see more than 1 mbps of very unreliable internet. We have radio internet but it has to be line of sight so... huge areas without access.

I live in town so I have cable internet and I can only sympathize.

It’ll be interesting to see how this will play out in even more remote area. I.e sub sahara Africa.

 

Absolutely! Just wait until "Tread Lightly" comes to space

 

A bit south and east of DV but Nipton is for sale again if you’ve got a spare $2.75M. Good but semi-paywalled article:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schitt...es-selling-california-desert-town-11622126653

The TL;DR is that it is being sold again by the same owner since 1985 because in the last sale about five years ago she part financed the sale and the new owners defaulted so she’s got it back after foreclosing on them. I sort of think this is good news as those defaulting new owners were trying to turn it into a cannabis recreation center. Though I suppose the next group could perhaps be worse and burn it down like the new Cerro Gordo owner did...

We stayed a night there back in 2008 and it was fun with a delicious dinner.

 

Desert Oracle had a good episode about that Cannibis deal..

 

There are several weed stores along 395 now....

 

and most are on the reservations so there isn't any sales tax..........