Last week I tried to explain the basics about LEOs – low earth orbit satellites. With about 800 satellites in orbit, Starlink has only intermittent coverage anywhere, but some Canadian and Northern US users have been testing the system. Using Ookla. Com, one of the most trusted internet signal measurement websites, here are some results. Test your own system with Ookla to compare. Here’s mine, which is from a local ISP via radio signals. By the way, there is also a great website that constantly updates Starlink coverage. Locate your home on the globe and it reads out how many minutes per day of coverage. Remember, if it says 85% that the 15% of no coverage does not occur at regular times each day. While the upload and download speed for Starlink are fine for streaming whatever or uploading your own video, notice the latency, or ping times. This is the round-trip delay I talked about. For optical fiber it is less than 12 milliseconds. For cable about twice that and DSL twice again. Starlink seems to be testing as low as 20 and high as 100 in rough numbers, so it’s similar to DSL. Meanwhile the high-altitude geostationary internet satellites are several hundred milliseconds. This used to be a big deal for one specific set of users, online video gamers. Any ping over about 30 will get you clobbered in Fortnite. But thanks to 2020 and COVID another even bigger group is now paying attention to latency: video chatting and meetings. To be sure, any satellite connection including Starlink is subject to environmental outages like heavy rainstorms.
I was a 9 year-old boy who stood out in my backyard on a chilly October night to see Sputnik, the very first satellite. So you can imagine how excited this nerd was when he saw videos of Starlink trains, like this one over the UK in May. I had hoped to capture one of the satellite strings for myself for this broadcast, but that may not happen. While people like me were thrilled with dots visible to the naked eye zooming across the sky, astronomers were not amused, and Spacex has taken steps to tone down visibility. This great website lists the best viewing times for your location. Not all the strings have been darkened yet, so you still might see one. I’m going to try in a couple of days.
Right now, the expected price is $100 per month with equipment costs of around $500.
Bottom line is this idea just might work, and I hope to find out for myself when coverage for my farm is available. I’ll let you know how it goes.
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