Large parts of the Southeast US are devastated by flooding and some parts, especially in western North Carolina are largely wiped out and completely cut off. More than 100 dead, more than 1,000 missing. Entire towns gone. The federal government and useless FEMA (23,000 employees, $29 billion budget) are nowhere to be seen.
The North Carolina Dept. of Transportation says that all roads in western NC should be considered closed.
Ryan Hall the internet weatherman, of RyanHallY'all fame, has joined with SpaceX to distribute Starlink ground station kits to these stricken communities. They are going to local first responders at first. They were asking for help from anyone with helicopters to help them get into more isolated places and the NC State Troopers and National Guard are assisting as are a number of private helicopters.
All a privately organized and funded project, just people trying to help their communities. Kamala and FEMA should pay attention and take notes.
Electrical power supplies are also going out to power the comms.
Apparently Jared Isaacman and Polaris are involved.
(Too bad that Washington DC doesn't think Starlink is good enough to supply Americans with rural internet --- probably because SpaceX is non-union and ignores their DEI requirements.)
Starlink ground transceiver kits being distributed by volunteers in rural North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia.
YazataOct 29, 2024 12:32 AM (This post was last modified: Oct 29, 2024 12:39 AM by Yazata.)
Starlink has just been approved for use in West Virginia and Virginia's National Radio Quiet Zone around the Green Bank Radio Observatory (and some secret US government communications facilities).
Very good Starlink-Mini review from The Verge. The reviewer really likes it.
He provides speed tests under different conditions, including vertical inside a backpack while hiking. He provides lots of information about performance of its built-in wifi, power requirements, cables and stuff like that. And he talks about cost of the unit and different plans.
I didn't know that both the units and the plans are priced differently in different countries. The unit costs $599 in the US, but only the equivalent of $200 in Guatamala. (The author paid 399 Euros in the Netherlands.) The plans vary similarly. A Roam-50GB plan is $50/mo. in the US while a Roam-Unlimited plan is $165/mo. In the Netherlands, the author pays 72 Euros/mo. for Roam-Unlimited. Not only are these differences related to per-capita income in the countries, they are also related to how many Starlink terminals are in a particular area and how congested the network is.
All in all, it doesn't sound as good as my present cable internet. Of couse I can't take my cable internet with me to places with no internet at all. That's the Starlink advantage.
Turns out that Gav Cornwell of Nasaspaceflight.com got a photo of what appear to be these "buoys" being tested at Port Canaveral several months ago, without realizing at the time what they were.
YazataFeb 10, 2025 10:12 PM (This post was last modified: Feb 10, 2025 10:14 PM by Yazata.)
T-Mobile ran the advertisement in the X post below during the Feb 9, 2025 Super Bowl, announcing a free 'beta' of their new 'direct to cell' capability. It will be available for free for everyone, no matter their cell-phone carrier, until July.
Sep 16, 2024 10:29 PM
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Is Elon Musk's "Starlink" doomed to only modest success? (satellite community)
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