Over the past few days, I have been installing and testing my new StarLink ground station. In the photo, it is sitting on a glass top table on the apron of my pool. The above link is to higher resolution photos. The cable runs to the lower floor of the pool building where my main router is situated. Feeding into my main router, internet access is provided to my entire LAN. Performance and ease of use is SUPERB.
I ordered the station when I first heard of StarLink, 2-3 years ago. Last week, I finally received as did quite few in Caldwell County. The residential model is currently priced at about $600 for the station hardware plus $110/month for the service.
SpaceX has single handedly brought about a revolution in rocketry just as Tesla has single handedly brought about the EV revolution. By claiming otherwise, President Biden has proven himself either extremely poorly informed or dishonest. SpaceX has enormously brought down the cost of launching mainly by developing reusable rockets. I think some of the SpaceX rockets/boosters have now been used 13 times; launched 13 times. Had it not been for SpaceX, we would still be at the mercy of Russia for servicing the International Space Station. SpaceX has developed a near a monopoly on affordable launches. NASA was slow to recognize.
I've long sought a way to invest in SpaceX; it is a privately held, not publicly traded, corporation. The best I have found is the Baron family of funds. BPTIX and BPTRX hold about 5% of assets in SpaceX. StarLink is a subsidiary of SpaceX but is expected to soon be "spun off" into a publicly traded company. It is hoped that the value of my Baron investments will increase, perhaps explode, after the IPO.
StarLink, increasingly, is offering internet access to much of Earth's surface. That is accomplished through an enormous constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites. Right now, there are thousands of operational satellites; the completed system will be tens of thousands. Right now, SpaceX puts up to sixty satellites in orbit from a single launch. Traditional satellite internet service is provided by a relatively small number of large and complex satellites placed in geosynchronous orbits. Meaning the satellites stay above fixed point on the Earth. LEO satellites are much lower (giving much faster response due to shorter signal travel distances) but they are in continuous motion relative to Earth surface.
My impressions of my StarLink ground station:
1) It is exceedingly easy to self install. Contributing is the lack of a default wifi password.
2) Latency is well under 100 milliseconds.
3) Bandwidth varies wildly as you might expect when it must constantly shift from one satellite to another as the satellites march across the sky. I typically observe around 100 Mbps but that can go as low as about 10 Mbps. Others, in other areas, report 200 Mbps or a bit higher. My old wifi provider ranged from zero (during much longer periods than I find acceptable) up to about 6 Mbps. With about 2-3 Mbps being common. Depending on where I am in my LAN, the signal may have to go through up to four wifi bridges (or links). That is in order to make my LAN extent a mile or so. Those bridges cut my usable bandwidth down to single digit Mbps; that is, less than 1/10 of the bandwidth StarLink is providing. A pretty good solution might be to move my main router to my house where most of the demand is. But, that's a major LAN reconfiguration.
