This has completely changed my industry (hard rock mining). A lot of the time drillers would be in the middle of nowhere looking for resources and would be sometimes days away from providing results (which also lead to lots of dodgy situations where drillers would know some results before market…) now it’s instant live feed. It’s made revising drilling plans trivial. Very cool
Maybe it's just me, but the heart of going camping, adventuring, out into the wild, going to the beach, etc (essentially, getting away from it all), seems in nearly direct opposition to having internet at every single one of these places.
I often work from campsites. I no longer have to rely on if there is 4/5G signal, and can borrow a family members Mini (and pay for a month of service).
That means I can now head out on Wednesday after work, drive 3-5 hours to the middle of no-where, and work Thursday and Friday. But each of those days, I am able to be done working and then at a camping site with my family. Go on hikes, fish, swim, etc.
So now my whole family can enjoy being in the wild, and I don't have to burn up vacation days. And we don't have to try to jam it all into a weekend were you feel like your just travelling the whole time.
Side note.. Having no signal on the west coast can actually be extremely dangerous, with how fast some wild-fires have spread. You can have one 10 miles away and not know it with the wind blowing the other way, and if it shifts direction, you can have a very limited time and path to get away.
Being able to check tools like WatchDuty and weather reports from the middle of nowhere is a safety feature.
Long before Starlink I actually tried something similar: book a hotel or airbnb in a place with good natural beauty. Work remote for the day, log off promptly at 5pm and then go on a hike or bike ride. I felt that I did not enjoy it at all. Work is emotionally draining enough that the quality of an after-work hike is far below a hike on a weekend. I stopped doing that.
I feel the same. But doing a half day each works great for me.
Ski 8-noon, then work in the warm.
Desert hike 6-10 then work in the cool.
That way if work is engaging - maybe you get into a nice flow state - you can keep going into the evening and your body already got the outdoors it likes.
I have done a variation on this. Take a vacation, drive to a national park, and go camping. Then go to an airbnb with good natural beauty, work thursday and friday, go hiking on the weekend, then take a travel day to come home.
This allowed me to take a longer vacation while still separating work time from hiking time. The emotionally draining work days coincided with much-needed recharge time in between the strenuous camping/hiking days and the weekend of more hiking.
I had coworkers who worked east coast hours but lived on the west coast, so they were off at 2 every day. A lot of them initially had all kinds of plans for what they would do with their free afternoons, but in the end, seemingly all of them did about what those of us who work til 5 do after work, just with an earlier bedtime.
I worked with the reverse! Boss was on the west coast and I on the east. Honestly much preferred it. Having the open morning and starting work after a no-rush breakfast, some exercise, etc. was divine.
I am not a morning person, and I have dreamed of that setup. I think I would choose to sleep in until 10 or 10:30 most days and I would use my late evenings to enjoy that last bit of open time at the climbing gym where it's a bit quieter. I really like night time, but when I have a regular work schedule I have to go to bed a couple hours before I would really like to.
Sure, but in the parent's post, the family is able to enjoy the camp time, and they're able to somewhat enjoy the time, not have to drive 3-5h on Friday during rush hour when everyone else is doing the same, and not have to turn around and pack up camp <48h later.
I've had good and bad remote work vacations. My best was when I was able to link together 11 days out of town and only have to work 2 of them.
Same. I've done what parent post said with much success, but when I try to make it my own vacation, it's always short. It is nice to let the family enjoy it though
But you know what I’m gonna call this for what it is. Greed. Everyone wants everything all the time. But what cost are we paying for that? Astronomers can’t view the night sky anymore. And not to mention the power we give an oligarch.
Different strokes for different folks. One of my favorite vacations involved working out of hotels during the day and driving around the Colorado Rockies in the afternoon/evening.
The family aspect is the crux here for me...it's great to get the family out enjoying things while us poor saps left back at the campsite just enjoy a slightly different view behind our laptop screen for most the day.
That's what I was thinking. Enjoyment is often benchmarked more by sharing the experience with other people. While I begrudgingly must admit this as an introvert, my introversion makes it no less true!
Better than not, I guess. But it would better still to have more vacation days (if you're American, then most of the world probably has twice as many as you do)
There are approximately ~250 weekdays in a year (so excluding weekends). 250/30 =
~8.3% of the days. So if you had 30 days PTO a year, that's be an 8.3% difference vs. having 0 days PTO. I find it hard to believe that an 8.3% difference in working days would make a huge difference to overall productivity.
Trade-offs? Like better quality of life? I was amazed 30 years ago when I went to Italy and all these Germans were lounging around for a month on Sardinia imagine getting a month vacation every year and spending that quality time with your family instead of being stuck behind a computer why your family is often enjoying itself?
Starlink is only extending work time when it should be vacation time
I do agree when comparing developed wealthy nations the US ranks poorly on average vacation days per worker.
But on a global standard across all peoples, even those in the informal economies? US probably works out better.
Not that being a bit better off than subsistence farmers in extreme poverty is a high standard to cross, it's still a pretty low bar. I'd still recommend scoping your claims accurately.
The next time a company tells me I have unlimited vacation, I will ask them the minimum number of days I need to take off a year. If they can't answer, then their "unlimited vacation" is just an accounting trick to take the financial liability of PTO off their books.
I go truck camping and do a lot of day trips to places where there probably will never be traditional cell phone service. I was against taking a starlink out for a while, but on a couple of weeklong trips over the last couple of years I started to dread my phone coming back online as I was driving out of the woods and all the attendant notificiations. For better or worse I would rather get online and go through all my texts and any emergency work stuff once a day than have to sift through 7 days of catching up on context. It's easy to say "just don't catch up" but it's difficult in practice.
I spend enough time in these places that I'm happy with the balance. I don't run the dish mounted all the time. I don't go out to watch movies, though that could be nice when you are north of the 45th in winter and nights feel like they are 16 hours long. Also it's nice if you forgot to check if your offline maps are still downloaded.
You need to take care of yourself and learn to switch off man. It's quite liberating to tell your colleagues "my laptop is going in the closet for 2 weeks and I'm uninstalling teams from my phone." If my team cannot survive without me for a week, then we have a huge problem.
Add to that, I take my work laptop when out on trips, not to work. But if I get stuck I don't need to call in sick and can still get something done if I need to wait out a snowstorm or road closure.
These days with AI it's a lot easier to come back after missing several days. It can often do a good job distilling things, especially if it already knows the kinds of things you'll really care to hone in on and prioritize.
A lot of folks here making arguments for safety and convenience, but ultimately for me the issue is around what I might call "plausibility of unreachableness": basically whether being genuinely offline and unreachable is normal and socially expected when you're doing certain activities, the number of which has dwindled over time.
It's obviously possible to say "I'm going to be unreachable", but people don't really like that, and it becomes a push-pull unless you're doing something where you genuinely have no service or connection. For a long time, being on an airplane allowed this sort of ability to disconnect: even if there were $5/minute in-seat phones, nobody reasonably expected to be able to reach you if you said you'd be on a flight. A few hours where you could fully tune out the noise of the world, no questions asked.
Wilderness backpacking trips have maintained this sort of unreachableness fairly well–I've had a Garmin inReach for years, and used it to keep family apprised of our movements, and once to coordinate a fairly serious situation where a large wildfire kicked up near our exit, but ultimately the slow messaging and short length limits prevent any real communication. Cell phones have also started getting satellite functionality, but it doesn't work very well, yet, at least as far as I've seen.
I see this march towards internet everywhere all the time as ultimately leading to expectations of connectivity, even in the most remote places–then "will you have made camp by 6pm on Tuesday? If so can you join this quick call?" becomes a real question people feel entitled to ask, notifications start coming through when you turn it on to check the weather, "I'm going back to my tent to check a few emails before bed" might be something you hear around the campfire...
I do a fair bit of wilderness backpacking, and I always put my phone on airplane mode as soon as I walk into the woods, and take it off airplane mode when I get back to civilization. No Garmin InReach, but I do have a PLB for safety (here in NZ land SAR advises everybody who is in the backcountry to carry a PLB), but it has no functionality beyond "press this in case of emergency."
I once had a hiking partner on a classic hut to hut hike on the north island (Tongariro Northern Circuit, it's where they filmed mount doom and mordor) who walked out of the hut at night to find a ridge to get service to do a job interview with a company in the UK.
The disconnection from real life is a huge part of why I like to wander off into the woods, and I pray that I will never be expected to have internet in these remote places.
You shouldn't have to, sure, but I think we've seen a monotonic progression towards the expectation of work-related availability outside of working hours for decades now.
We introduced "Right to disconnect" laws in Australia years ago:
> Employees have the right to refuse contact outside their working hours unless that refusal is unreasonable. This means an employee can refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from an employer or a third party.
We don't have "at-will employment", so you can't be fired for arbitrary reasons. And if you were to treat someone poorly or fire them for refusing to be available for free after hours, you would end up in serious trouble in front of the Fair Work Commission.
This is the main value of governments, have them regulate these things for your protection!
To be devils advocate - do you expect your employer send flowers and give vacation days when your parents pass away? Or advance your salary if you short? Or tons of other forms of flexibility in return?
In societies where all of this is encoded in law they seem to be doing worse off than where these things are based on trust.
Australia's doing fine and we have bereavement days. Somehow our employers find the capacity to still provide flexibility. No, it would be unreasonable to expect those things from your employer and yes it's better to have employee protections actioned within the law.
When I worked remotely, I liked going camping for weeks at a time during the summer and working from the campsite. At the time all I had available to me was shitty mobile data, which made it challenging but not impossible. Starlink would have been a godsend.
A co-worker of mine is traveling to parks all around the country and basically camping full-time. StarLink on his fifth wheel allows him to work during business hours and then walk off into a forest at 5pm.
I've thought about doing something like that but having to file personal taxes in those states and triggering some kind of issue for my employer who only has a presence in two states has stopped me from doing it.
Am I misunderstanding something or are people just less risk averse than me when it comes to taxes?
This is a great example. As long as you have internet you can put outside, this is very useful.
Of course, a mobile hotspot will work both indoors and outdoors, but not have the Coverage.
There's no shortage of people that work in extremely remote areas that are effectively isolated or cut off or Reliant on Wi-Fi wherever they can find it in between cellular covers that might be spotty at best.
We have to remember that there's more land in the world that people don't heavily occupy compared to the land where people do heavily occupy it.
The other day I sat on a bench at sunset at Albany Bulb and watched as San Francisco slowly turned on the lights and day gave way to night. After some photography and quiet moments with the view, I took a few minutes to test the latest rev of my mobile webapp. Then I used voice mode to give feedback to my coding agent, and it started working up fixes. I looked up from the phone and was struck with the beauty of the view once again.
Products like Apple Vision Pro promised working on productivity apps with beautiful views of Yosemite displayed behind the virtual computer screens. But now with a cell phone and voice mode (I don’t have starlink but I have enjoyed it in the past), I can work on my app while I’m taking a break in the middle of a bike ride.
I often say I love the work that I do but I don’t like being at the computer. Specifically that the best work I’ve done is sitting at a desktop in one place for hours at a day for years on end. To me, things like voice mode on mobile is a revelation. I long dreamed of doing productive work on the go, and this is a way I can do that. I’m not sure I want starlink personally, but I can certainly see the appeal of setting up at a park and getting a few hours of work done before putting it all away and doing a hike to the summit.
It's not just you. I am deeply saddened that there will no longer be any true wilderness anymore. If I stumble across someone on a work call or prompting their agents 30 miles from the trailhead in the Sierra I think I will go mad.
Technological changes are always ecological, never purely optional. They change expectations, mores, etc.
It’s the opposite for me and my family, but more so because of safety. I bought my mom a Starlink mini and portable battery because she does a lot of road trips and camping in remote places. Many times there’s no cell reception. If she needed to look anything up or communicate with anyone in those places, there are limited options.
Yes there’s satphones, but then might as well have the entire internet for the same price or less. The $10/mo Starlink standby plan seems well worth it for insurance
Me too. But Starlink definitely makes our group more confident when we go camping deep in the forest or mountain. If you are discipline enough to just treat it as a much more capable emergency satellite phone then it's a great addition to your camping kit.
Considering glamping is getting traction a lot over the last few years, there's probably a lot of people who want to watch movies and such while outdoors.
There are many many uses that aren't camping. People work in places with no cell or wifi doing jobs that require driving or walking or helicoptering in. Then they want access to data to look something up. Geology / oil industry for example.
Yea also, a few years ago I traveled around the entire US with a 4g hotspot and had service in nearly every place I visited, even in many remote national parks. With 5g being significantly faster than starlink, it does seem that this is an incredibly niche product.
Cell service requires radio connectivity to a cell tower, which depends on distance and local terrain. It's quite common to have connectivity on a ridge or mountaintop, but lose it in a valley. Starlink works as long as you can see the sky.
Also 5g speeds in a suburban or urban area are significantly different from the wilderness. I have some property an hour drive from Portland. While some people can get a signal and their phone says "5G", the distance to the cell towers is great enough that actual connectivity is extremely spotty. It takes minutes to download a single photo. Starlink is much more consistent. You actually get better performance if you're farther from civilization.
National parks in the US are pretty well developed, and often crowded. You and I may just travel differently; my preferred camp sites are usually far away from cell coverage.
Indeed. There's plenty of National Forests (not National Parks) with near zero cell service, and often even less once you start venturing into undeveloped BLM land.
I have left jobs that required me to do work that impacted my time with my family. I quit one job while on vacation because my immediate supervisor kept calling me and giving me directions to a hotel business center an hour away from where we were camping.
Unless you run a business that literally requires 24/7 connectivity, it's healthy and fine to step away. If your employer won't respect your time with your family, they don't respect you.
It's up to you to decide if you can live with that. I could not.
I've been contracting for nearly 10 years which means going on holiday costs you a lot more than the actual flights and accommodation. I'll be going camping with my kids for 3 weeks this summer (New Zealand). Starlink is like $350 NZD, absolute no brainer.
But I also agree with parent OPs sentiment - going offline, putting your phone away really connects you back to real world and family. This has been studied ad nauseam. Same as food, substance or any indulgent abuse - it's up to you to control yourself.
For the first question, op talked about work commitments. So that's not a stretch to assume.
For the second, I get it. Not everyone can. I shouldn't have when I did, but it worked out okay for me after a few months of pain. And I'd do it again in a heartbeat. We had to downsize our lives and I switched to a field I never thought I'd work in. Turns out I love it, and have way more time for my family, even if we can't do massive vacations now.
To me, it's nice to know if you had to connect and get a message out you can. There's also the drive out there and the drive back which can be boring for a passenger with no signal.
I found disconnection to be a factor creating hesitation to spend a weekend at a campground out in the north woods. The things I do online are a big part of who I am, and being able to do those things and also go paddling / hiking in the same weekend is wonderful. I don’t think people should worry about the purity of their nature experiences. If someone wants to go full bushcraft, or if they want to blog from a canoe, I wish them the most out of whatever experience they seek. Except generators, I hope they all blow a head gasket.
If you live close to nature, but with an Internet connection, isn't that closer to the heart than living far from nature and going camping every once in a while with no connection?
I've taken an Iridium phone when I've been truly off grid (e.g., hundreds of miles from a road, hundreds of miles from cellular service), for me I just liked having a lifeline in an actual emergency.
I agree with you. As a homeless person who spends a lot of time in these natural places and campgrounds all I see now are people stuck in their vans and RVs with a Starlink antenna on their roof.
I’m going to say this with the knowledge that I will be attacked for it, but since Starlink came to these natural places, I’ve had a more difficult time sleeping. Plus my tinnitus is worse every time it’s around me. I know I am sensitive to electromagnetic fields. They caused me insomnia, tinnitus, and increase my anxiety and episodes of psychosis. I believe this is due to genetic changes I have in my calcium, potassium and sodium ion channels.
I’ve done all the double blind test on this I could and these KU bands really affect me. They spread out over 13 mile hexagonal shape whenever someone has a Starlink running.
When I’m in these places my phone has its data connection turned off, unless I’m doing something like posting on HN complaining about electromagnetic radiation.
I've done every kind of camping, all over the world. I take a little Garmin puck with me to ensure I'm never ever stranded in an emergency. I suspect you don't actually go camping.
Agreed. I live in NZ where the rule of thumb is to keep a PLB on your person at all times and time from pulling the PLB to having a SAR helicopter overhead can be as low as two hours (it can be significantly longer depending on weather).
Most people I know who spend significant time outdoors here have one and keep it on our person whenever we're on something more intense than a well marked day hike. This is true of everybody I know from those of us who do 2-3 night backpacking trips between marked campsites to backcountry skiing to mountaineering. It's one of the first things that is advised to tourists here is to borrow one from a gear shop or visitor centre before going into the backcountry.
Here at least it is viewed as common sense safety on the same level as carrying layers and water.
I spend well north of 100 days a year in the backcountry in some capacity or another, from day hikes and skis to week+ trips on glaciers in Alaska in the winter being dropped off by plane and where the pickup time/day is "when we can get weather to get back in there" and that would be the same timeline for any kind of SAR response.
I couldn't disagree more with being stranded without communication being the heart of camping. Satellite comms have absolutely increased safety, and allowed for bigger expeditions to be handled. I have multiple mentors a few decades older than me who had friends die in situations that would have likely been recoverable today. I'm not planning on taking a starlink backpacking, but the one on my truck camper has been a transformative tool in how I'm able to recreate.
That's because you view those activities as separate from your "normal" life, and those events for you are so short that you can put your entire life on hold to do them
I saw a video recently about a silicon valley tech bro who goes hiking with a starlink receiver on his backpack so that he can prompt his agents while he hikes and never lose a single second of vibe coding productivity. It made me want to throw my laptop out of the window.
Every year we go to campsites for about 3 weeks. Every year i have the dream to leave my phone at home. I am way too much into tech. Cant live without it. At least not at this point of life.
For me also, and for camping, it's not just for disconnection from work, etc.
There's a very different psychology when you're completely self-reliant, with no communication with civilization. It's hard to express precisely, but it's powerfully liberating and a much more immersive alternative from everyday civilization. The door is shut on other options for a few days, at least.
(Yes, there's risk - though that can be greatly overemphasized and there's risk in everything - and you need to rely on yourself (and your group) to mitigate those risks and respond effectively to them, not on others. One leading trainer I read said that, once you're out of harm's way, the first thing is think. Nothing is going to happen immediately; the ambulance isn't going to be there in 5 minutes; the doctors won't see you for days, at least.)
The risk isn't the focus. It's just you and world around you.
Not everyone can do that - they have responsibilities they can't turn off, they have health challenges, they may want a compromise, like one of those emergency pager devices. I'm saying the effect of actually being disconnected is real, powerful, and valuable.
While I generally agree, there is something magical/cool about being in remote wilderness without any signs of civilization, and writing code (or working on somethi technical) in that setting.
I agree. I carry only two things for off-grid camping:
1. My iPhone, which has exactly the right amount of satellite communication for me: SOS and simple two-way texting, only when I actively point it at the right place in the sky, and
2. Aviation band handheld radio as a true last resort. Have one anyway as a pilot, and I figure it's unlikely I'll go more than a few hours without seeing some airliner I can talk to. Illegal to use those bands for this? Technically. Am I worried about the FCC putting me in jail if I'm down to my last fallback to get a critical message out? Nope.
Amazing mindset, so you’d rather risk distracting a pilot and causing an accident than buy a PLB or other emergency beacon for a few hundred bucks as a backup for your phone?
Let's face it, does anyone get rescued on Delta's company frequency? ;)
Half the time I expect when someone throws a genuine emergency out on 121.5 the peanut gallery will all light up screaming that THEY'RE ON GUUUUAAAAARRRRRRDDDDDDD instead of realizing they should shut up and help the poor guy calling for it.
Nearly spit out my airplane coffee and biscoffs reading this. Good to know there are others in the industry on this forum who know about the guard police. Thanks for the laugh!
Not really, if the goals is to maximise getting away, being able to be productive _wile_ on location means you can go, work a bit there, and then be on the trail immediately, you can spend much more time in the mountains than otherwise.
Plus actually working in a nice place like that is in itself a luxury worth the price.
If only this incredible technical achievement could not be linked to such a toxic individual… eh one can only dream, maybe greatness requires a bit of madness.
Au contraire, if you are in general aviation, the last thing you want is to be caught with no radio contact whatsoever while you are stranded. Communication keeps you alive.
I want so badly for starlink to offer a sensible well priced self-service B2B offering with fleet management. Any kind of fixed, high bandwidth IoT device that currently has a SIM card could easily use a starlink. As it stands SMBs who want this have to screw around with residential starlink and live in fear that they’ll get banned.
Not sure if this would cover the use cases you're thinking of, but they have significantly improved management for business customers in the past year or so.
Last year, you couldn't get API access at all unless you went through one of their distributors or spent $1M+/year on Starlink, but now you can use the API [0] as a normal business customer. It's got pretty good telemetry and management features.
Starlink 'Business' and 'Enterprise' plans are fundamentally different [1]. 1M/yr spend to qualify [1]. A lot of features you expect [3] are not included in normal business plans (or are exclusive to certain units). The segmentation is strange as offering this as 'up-sell' is 100% businesses would pay for. You don't have to take my word on it, as there is a validated market of 'resellers' [2] where you functionally join the reseller's enterprise plan. Paying the 'reseller' a tax to gain access to features starlink fully supports, but simply will not 'sell' to smaller customers, through the reseller's API gateway. It is absurd.
3. where is my ground station, defer updates to a ground station, de/re-activate a ground station remotely, pool usage for all ground stations, remote reboot, all traffic is through a corporate VPN, bound multiple ground stations automatically.
Wow, I really thought there'd be some kind of piecemeal offering that businesses could pay for, but it looks like the most Starlink offers is a flat rate for more data if you burn through your current usage allotment.
My company has been trying to get T-Mobile to return our calls for nearly a year now regarding any information on their promised IoT solution. Nothing so far.
A reasonably priced routing via satellite links is my dream. I work from NZ on various Salesforce projects (aka enterprise web apps). Ping is usually 200ms or so to the US. Laser interlinks could possibly cut that in half.
Removable battery is cool. Does "quick-swap" mean you can switch the battery while it's operating? I always thought it would be a good idea for devices like this to have a tiny secondary battery or large capacitor in the main unit that would let it keep going for a few seconds while you swap the main battery.
Also curious about this; I'm not much of a tinkerer but I did see their battery has a USB-C port. Is there some efficiency loss in using a spare battery as a power bank rather than actually replacing the battery where it lives?
And it seems to have a normal USB-C port now! Excellent, having to order that old weird cable of theirs was a pain, especially when one broke out in the wild.
I consider this to be a bit of a downgrade - the Mini 1 would accept anything from 12-48 V without negotiation, which made it really easy to power from a vehicle battery or DC wall power (if you have off-grid solar). If you did want to supply it via USB you just needed a small and cheap "dummy load" to negotiate for a voltage in that range. Now, you have to use a PD supply, and those are very hard to find at 36/48 V (in fact, this is the only single one I'm aware of that will do 60 W: https://www.coolgear.com/product/chargeit-mini-82w-usb-type-... ).
It's cool but 4.5 hours feels low for what you'd want. Between sometimes not fully charged, degradation, not wanting to fully deplete the battery your average comfortable use-time is going to be more like 2.5-3 hours. A burst of work but an entire half day of work is pushing it. It also competes with your phone hotspot, and is more of an advantage where you dont have cell coverage (more remote - where you are more sensitive to lower battery life because you cant recharge as easily).
Let me reiterate. I think this is actually awesome and I'm sure 4.5hrs is a big accomplishment. Starlink is awesome. I just think for any product you need to discount the stated battery life significantly.
I wouldn't look at the battery as a way of powering the day. Look at it as a way of getting temporary service up and running without having to hunt down a power source. Or seamlessly moving between power sources. Or something that can help buffer from fluctuations in solar output.
I love my mini 1 but occasionally I have to move it around and it's annoying to wait minutes for reconnect if the power cable is adjusted.
15 W is the Mini 1's rated "idle" power draw [0], so it's hard to tell if they're just being very generous with the "up to" figure (assuming the dish isn't being used at all) or if efficiency is improved. You'd think they'd mention if it was.
My mini draws about 40-50w at start then stabilizes at 25w-30w at steady state. I put mini in my backpack next to my laptop with a 86Wh power brick and go hiking.
Phone now has satellite that makes me reachable. In case of emergency I bust out the mini and the laptop and I join the bridge.
This is not in theory, I actually joined emergency calls a few times.
Probably don’t need mini2 at this time. It only removes the power brick for me.
I wanted to get one so bad because I’m a very frequent travelled and the idea of Starlink sounded so interesting
I just checked a few weeks ago and “Roam” does no longer include international coverage at all. Only “Roam unlimited” does, and only for 30 days at a time which entirely defeats the purpose for me. Also no way to replenish this quota or buy additional, you have to go back to your country for it to reset.
My SIM card already gives me 14 days of roaming included, so Starlink is just marginally better for my use case.
I’m sure it’s regulations related but still a bummer :(
Starlink Mini 1st has been on 'clearance' for $149 for a while. Wonder if this is a worthwhile upgrade for truck camping or if the Mini 1 is still a good deal. No indication on price yet?
I don't see anything here that would meaningfully improve it assuming your truck has a reasonable power situation when it's not running. Mine runs off house batteries in the camper. And for whatever the price difference is from $150 you can buy a much more versatile power bank for camping.
For truck camping it feels like the main upgrade to this version, the built in battery, is unnecessary because you can power it off the vehicle when you need to or have a separate little battery pack power the Mini.
That's exactly how I'm reading it as well. I've got an EV and an auxiliary 3kWh battery and at $149 for the hardware that still seems like a great deal. I'm interested to read about the use cases folks have for the battery to be integrated.
It seems like the launch requires purchasing it with a bundled 1 year subscription for $999. I hope they sell it standalone like the old Mini. I'm planning to pick one up to have as primarily backup internet and just pay the standby fee to have it paused as needed.
They gave me a free mini as a promotion to residential customers. It worked for them, I now have it mounted in my daily driver and pay them ~$27/month more. That's half the price of a mini-only subscription. Standby would be enough for me except that it doesn't work while in motion.
Got a lot of usage with my Mini when traveling across the southwestern US and Mexico, but they no longer allow travel usage outside US/Canada which is a huge bummer and forced me to switch back to cell coverage which isn’t nearly as good.
Because this is so useful to several industries, governments absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly on what may become fundamental infrastructure. We've already seen what happened in Ukraine.
He has created something that didn't exist a few years ago, and now governments "absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly" are you saying they need to subsidize competitors or they need to ban Starlink or they need to nationalize Starlink?
Those are the three options for your mandate.
the non-government intervention option is just for Starlink to prove the market, and others can move in. SpaceX is willing to sell them the ride for a decent price, in relative terms.
Fundamentally, I am in the Camp that I fucking hate Musk, I didn't use to. But its undeniable, how influential he is in SpaceX and Starlink in particular.
I remember all the podcasts and haters shitting on him in, I think 2016, when the complete Starlink leadship was fired. We don't know all the details, but it's said that they wanted to do a whole other round of test sats and so on. Musk wanted to push harder on go live sooner. That' seems to have turned out quite well with no major issues in the first generation.
So SpaceX and Musk most certainty deserve a big reward for that. I agree that just rushing into 'its monopoly we must destroy the monopoly' isn't the right approach.
> Those are the three options for your mandate.
Those are not actually the only 3 only options. That's an incredibly narrow minded approach.
I have some idea but I'm sure there are more.
For example, what often works with infrastructure like this is open access rights. What if we can decouple the ground and sats infrastructure.
Allow anybody to build terminals for it. And then potentially eventually even have terminals that can use multiple such systems. I'm not an expert on these systems and how exactly they connect but long term I assume this would be possible. Because that's exactly what "GPS" does today, it connects to like 6 different systems. You could pay SpaceX a one-time fee for that. Or a license per terminal.
Or you could start to establish some standard for laser connectivity in space that eventually everybody can connect to a waste laser data network in space.
You can also make other rules. Like net neutrality, SpaceX isn't allowed to block certain things or do certain things.
Government could also chance its mentality to spectrum and maybe the buy to own spectrum model isn't fantastic.
That said, nationalization is on the table as well. One can make the argument that having multiple such system isn't really worth it. Having one and then giving it out in a different way isn't crazy. SpaceX could still be a transport provider.
Also less controversially, I think the 'monopoly' thing is way worse when it comes to the Ukraine. That is a situation where the government should be clear about how to handle it. We can't have Musk doing his own foreign policy.
The upside of Starlink is it’s not easily blockable by a terrestrial nation state; the downside of Starlink is it’s easily blockable by a single fickle trillionaire. That first problem’s been a bear to work around for the entire Internet era, that second one’s gonna be the challenge going forward.
People keep saying this, how do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap after it is nationalized? No one who calls for nationalization ever has an answer to this.
Frankly, there is the argument that all of this tech and optimization was there for others to develop but no one cared that much and its only now after you and others realize how good it is that you want to just go in and take it "because its so vital to national security".
Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs?
Clearly leadership at SpaceX including Musk are a driving force behind this being so good...just look at the trash all the other companies are peddling. The magic might just go away if its nationalized and if it does then you probably can't just go "oh sorry bro heres your company back pls give us more magic".
Excited to see how the huge cottage industry of people trying to package minis into weapons systems react to this. It looks like it'll be slightly more of a pain in the ass than the previous version but maybe Elon threw the MIC a bone and made them disassemble-able
Yes, this is really a thing, yes, I'm being sarcastic.
I don't think SpaceX offers a bare/stripped OEM version at all. Afaik everyone is just using minis which is fucking insane.
Every other tactical comms vendor offers some sort of bare module/modem assembly for system integration, usually just a modded PCB that's inside their existing offerings with a few different JST connectors instead of whatever giant $500 amphenol twist lock they use.
I use Starlink on my small boat near shore in PNW - where there is no mobile network, works perfect, DC cable is inconvinience, battery is much more useful imo. Great upgrade
Distance alone isn’t the real issue (newer Pixel phones can talk to GEO, which is 100 times farther out than Starlink in LEO!), data rate over distance is.
It's not inherently because of space, it's because phased array antennas are just very power hungry. Most of the link budget is coming from the satellites huge antenna, the mini has a comparatively tiny aperture
This is false. SpaceX still plans to launch commercial payloads, but it is shifting these missions from Falcon 9 to Starship. SpaceX has already sold commercial missions for Starship.
When do you think I could subscribe to some service like this, but without funding global fascism? Are the EU based services available for North America?
What about centralizing forces causes people to do Nazi salutes on stages, cut off internet to allows, and fund Nazi sympathizers in elections, do you think?
This has completely changed my industry (hard rock mining). A lot of the time drillers would be in the middle of nowhere looking for resources and would be sometimes days away from providing results (which also lead to lots of dodgy situations where drillers would know some results before market…) now it’s instant live feed. It’s made revising drilling plans trivial. Very cool
Maybe it's just me, but the heart of going camping, adventuring, out into the wild, going to the beach, etc (essentially, getting away from it all), seems in nearly direct opposition to having internet at every single one of these places.
I often work from campsites. I no longer have to rely on if there is 4/5G signal, and can borrow a family members Mini (and pay for a month of service).
That means I can now head out on Wednesday after work, drive 3-5 hours to the middle of no-where, and work Thursday and Friday. But each of those days, I am able to be done working and then at a camping site with my family. Go on hikes, fish, swim, etc.
So now my whole family can enjoy being in the wild, and I don't have to burn up vacation days. And we don't have to try to jam it all into a weekend were you feel like your just travelling the whole time.
Side note.. Having no signal on the west coast can actually be extremely dangerous, with how fast some wild-fires have spread. You can have one 10 miles away and not know it with the wind blowing the other way, and if it shifts direction, you can have a very limited time and path to get away.
Being able to check tools like WatchDuty and weather reports from the middle of nowhere is a safety feature.
Long before Starlink I actually tried something similar: book a hotel or airbnb in a place with good natural beauty. Work remote for the day, log off promptly at 5pm and then go on a hike or bike ride. I felt that I did not enjoy it at all. Work is emotionally draining enough that the quality of an after-work hike is far below a hike on a weekend. I stopped doing that.
I feel the same. But doing a half day each works great for me.
Ski 8-noon, then work in the warm.
Desert hike 6-10 then work in the cool.
That way if work is engaging - maybe you get into a nice flow state - you can keep going into the evening and your body already got the outdoors it likes.
I really like this mode a lot.
I have done a variation on this. Take a vacation, drive to a national park, and go camping. Then go to an airbnb with good natural beauty, work thursday and friday, go hiking on the weekend, then take a travel day to come home.
This allowed me to take a longer vacation while still separating work time from hiking time. The emotionally draining work days coincided with much-needed recharge time in between the strenuous camping/hiking days and the weekend of more hiking.
I had coworkers who worked east coast hours but lived on the west coast, so they were off at 2 every day. A lot of them initially had all kinds of plans for what they would do with their free afternoons, but in the end, seemingly all of them did about what those of us who work til 5 do after work, just with an earlier bedtime.
I worked with the reverse! Boss was on the west coast and I on the east. Honestly much preferred it. Having the open morning and starting work after a no-rush breakfast, some exercise, etc. was divine.
I am not a morning person, and I have dreamed of that setup. I think I would choose to sleep in until 10 or 10:30 most days and I would use my late evenings to enjoy that last bit of open time at the climbing gym where it's a bit quieter. I really like night time, but when I have a regular work schedule I have to go to bed a couple hours before I would really like to.
Sure, but in the parent's post, the family is able to enjoy the camp time, and they're able to somewhat enjoy the time, not have to drive 3-5h on Friday during rush hour when everyone else is doing the same, and not have to turn around and pack up camp <48h later.
I've had good and bad remote work vacations. My best was when I was able to link together 11 days out of town and only have to work 2 of them.
Same. I've done what parent post said with much success, but when I try to make it my own vacation, it's always short. It is nice to let the family enjoy it though
But you know what I’m gonna call this for what it is. Greed. Everyone wants everything all the time. But what cost are we paying for that? Astronomers can’t view the night sky anymore. And not to mention the power we give an oligarch.
Them viewing night sky is not as important as these. Astronomers can use telescopes in space.
Thats a good observation - the capacity to appreciate something is probably as important as just being (in this case) in a beautiful space.
Different strokes for different folks. One of my favorite vacations involved working out of hotels during the day and driving around the Colorado Rockies in the afternoon/evening.
Workation doesn't work...
It does, you just have to make it long enough to have time to explore and weekends. My fave time are month+ workations.
You can still go on hikes on the weekend
The family aspect is the crux here for me...it's great to get the family out enjoying things while us poor saps left back at the campsite just enjoy a slightly different view behind our laptop screen for most the day.
That's what I was thinking. Enjoyment is often benchmarked more by sharing the experience with other people. While I begrudgingly must admit this as an introvert, my introversion makes it no less true!
Better than not, I guess. But it would better still to have more vacation days (if you're American, then most of the world probably has twice as many as you do)
I always dislike the European vs American commentary. There are tradeoffs and we could easily go back and forth on those.
There are approximately ~250 weekdays in a year (so excluding weekends). 250/30 = ~8.3% of the days. So if you had 30 days PTO a year, that's be an 8.3% difference vs. having 0 days PTO. I find it hard to believe that an 8.3% difference in working days would make a huge difference to overall productivity.
Trade-offs? Like better quality of life? I was amazed 30 years ago when I went to Italy and all these Germans were lounging around for a month on Sardinia imagine getting a month vacation every year and spending that quality time with your family instead of being stuck behind a computer why your family is often enjoying itself?
Starlink is only extending work time when it should be vacation time
You're lucky that commentary isn't here then, as "most of the world" isn't just Europe.
But broadly speaking, life is better in most first world countries that aren't the US.
I do agree when comparing developed wealthy nations the US ranks poorly on average vacation days per worker.
But on a global standard across all peoples, even those in the informal economies? US probably works out better.
Not that being a bit better off than subsistence farmers in extreme poverty is a high standard to cross, it's still a pretty low bar. I'd still recommend scoping your claims accurately.
The demographic of Americans who use a Starlink to work from the wilderness probably has more vacation days than the mean European.
Joke's on you, I have "unlimited" vacation days...
The next time a company tells me I have unlimited vacation, I will ask them the minimum number of days I need to take off a year. If they can't answer, then their "unlimited vacation" is just an accounting trick to take the financial liability of PTO off their books.
That explains European economic growth vs the US over the last decade.
It explains the growth in the Quality of Life surveys of Europe vs the US over the last decade.
Who is living better, typically?
Agree, they've got their priorities straight over in Europe.
If you live on the road you can work remote now. You can camp and get some work done to finance your forever camping lifestyle.
I go truck camping and do a lot of day trips to places where there probably will never be traditional cell phone service. I was against taking a starlink out for a while, but on a couple of weeklong trips over the last couple of years I started to dread my phone coming back online as I was driving out of the woods and all the attendant notificiations. For better or worse I would rather get online and go through all my texts and any emergency work stuff once a day than have to sift through 7 days of catching up on context. It's easy to say "just don't catch up" but it's difficult in practice.
I spend enough time in these places that I'm happy with the balance. I don't run the dish mounted all the time. I don't go out to watch movies, though that could be nice when you are north of the 45th in winter and nights feel like they are 16 hours long. Also it's nice if you forgot to check if your offline maps are still downloaded.
You need to take care of yourself and learn to switch off man. It's quite liberating to tell your colleagues "my laptop is going in the closet for 2 weeks and I'm uninstalling teams from my phone." If my team cannot survive without me for a week, then we have a huge problem.
Okay but you can take real vacations and ALSO do what the parent is doing.
Add to that, I take my work laptop when out on trips, not to work. But if I get stuck I don't need to call in sick and can still get something done if I need to wait out a snowstorm or road closure.
These days with AI it's a lot easier to come back after missing several days. It can often do a good job distilling things, especially if it already knows the kinds of things you'll really care to hone in on and prioritize.
This is a great example. There's nothing wrong with having connectivity. This skill is just using it when you need to.
Even if we think about trackers that people will wear when going hiking and things like that for help, they have their utility in their place.
I would argue that it is still a different feeling if you actually away from society and out there vs. just around the corner in the big garden.
It's not having connectivity and more about being able to if it was needed period.
It's a similar to if we take a work laptop home and whether it can stay in the bag or not.
Thats not the point i made.
Its just different if you can look at your phone or turn it on or not.
> north of the 45th in winter and nights feel like they are 16 hours long.
Cries in Ireland
A lot of folks here making arguments for safety and convenience, but ultimately for me the issue is around what I might call "plausibility of unreachableness": basically whether being genuinely offline and unreachable is normal and socially expected when you're doing certain activities, the number of which has dwindled over time.
It's obviously possible to say "I'm going to be unreachable", but people don't really like that, and it becomes a push-pull unless you're doing something where you genuinely have no service or connection. For a long time, being on an airplane allowed this sort of ability to disconnect: even if there were $5/minute in-seat phones, nobody reasonably expected to be able to reach you if you said you'd be on a flight. A few hours where you could fully tune out the noise of the world, no questions asked.
Wilderness backpacking trips have maintained this sort of unreachableness fairly well–I've had a Garmin inReach for years, and used it to keep family apprised of our movements, and once to coordinate a fairly serious situation where a large wildfire kicked up near our exit, but ultimately the slow messaging and short length limits prevent any real communication. Cell phones have also started getting satellite functionality, but it doesn't work very well, yet, at least as far as I've seen.
I see this march towards internet everywhere all the time as ultimately leading to expectations of connectivity, even in the most remote places–then "will you have made camp by 6pm on Tuesday? If so can you join this quick call?" becomes a real question people feel entitled to ask, notifications start coming through when you turn it on to check the weather, "I'm going back to my tent to check a few emails before bed" might be something you hear around the campfire...
I do a fair bit of wilderness backpacking, and I always put my phone on airplane mode as soon as I walk into the woods, and take it off airplane mode when I get back to civilization. No Garmin InReach, but I do have a PLB for safety (here in NZ land SAR advises everybody who is in the backcountry to carry a PLB), but it has no functionality beyond "press this in case of emergency."
I once had a hiking partner on a classic hut to hut hike on the north island (Tongariro Northern Circuit, it's where they filmed mount doom and mordor) who walked out of the hut at night to find a ridge to get service to do a job interview with a company in the UK.
The disconnection from real life is a huge part of why I like to wander off into the woods, and I pray that I will never be expected to have internet in these remote places.
You shouldn't have to justify or explain not being available when it is not working hours. Turn that shit off at 5pm Friday and turn it on 8am Monday.
You shouldn't have to, sure, but I think we've seen a monotonic progression towards the expectation of work-related availability outside of working hours for decades now.
We introduced "Right to disconnect" laws in Australia years ago:
> Employees have the right to refuse contact outside their working hours unless that refusal is unreasonable. This means an employee can refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from an employer or a third party.
We don't have "at-will employment", so you can't be fired for arbitrary reasons. And if you were to treat someone poorly or fire them for refusing to be available for free after hours, you would end up in serious trouble in front of the Fair Work Commission.
This is the main value of governments, have them regulate these things for your protection!
That's not universal, there's still plenty of places to work where people respect working hours.
To be devils advocate - do you expect your employer send flowers and give vacation days when your parents pass away? Or advance your salary if you short? Or tons of other forms of flexibility in return?
In societies where all of this is encoded in law they seem to be doing worse off than where these things are based on trust.
Australia's doing fine and we have bereavement days. Somehow our employers find the capacity to still provide flexibility. No, it would be unreasonable to expect those things from your employer and yes it's better to have employee protections actioned within the law.
That's a cultural problem. You will never overcome culture problems by blaming technology.
Frankly in Switzerland, we already have connectivity everywhere, and people don't expect that.
Also its up to yourself putting up boundaries.
When I worked remotely, I liked going camping for weeks at a time during the summer and working from the campsite. At the time all I had available to me was shitty mobile data, which made it challenging but not impossible. Starlink would have been a godsend.
A co-worker of mine is traveling to parks all around the country and basically camping full-time. StarLink on his fifth wheel allows him to work during business hours and then walk off into a forest at 5pm.
That seems like it would be a tax nightmare.
I've thought about doing something like that but having to file personal taxes in those states and triggering some kind of issue for my employer who only has a presence in two states has stopped me from doing it.
Am I misunderstanding something or are people just less risk averse than me when it comes to taxes?
This is a great example. As long as you have internet you can put outside, this is very useful.
Of course, a mobile hotspot will work both indoors and outdoors, but not have the Coverage.
There's no shortage of people that work in extremely remote areas that are effectively isolated or cut off or Reliant on Wi-Fi wherever they can find it in between cellular covers that might be spotty at best.
We have to remember that there's more land in the world that people don't heavily occupy compared to the land where people do heavily occupy it.
The other day I sat on a bench at sunset at Albany Bulb and watched as San Francisco slowly turned on the lights and day gave way to night. After some photography and quiet moments with the view, I took a few minutes to test the latest rev of my mobile webapp. Then I used voice mode to give feedback to my coding agent, and it started working up fixes. I looked up from the phone and was struck with the beauty of the view once again.
Products like Apple Vision Pro promised working on productivity apps with beautiful views of Yosemite displayed behind the virtual computer screens. But now with a cell phone and voice mode (I don’t have starlink but I have enjoyed it in the past), I can work on my app while I’m taking a break in the middle of a bike ride.
I often say I love the work that I do but I don’t like being at the computer. Specifically that the best work I’ve done is sitting at a desktop in one place for hours at a day for years on end. To me, things like voice mode on mobile is a revelation. I long dreamed of doing productive work on the go, and this is a way I can do that. I’m not sure I want starlink personally, but I can certainly see the appeal of setting up at a park and getting a few hours of work done before putting it all away and doing a hike to the summit.
It's not just you. I am deeply saddened that there will no longer be any true wilderness anymore. If I stumble across someone on a work call or prompting their agents 30 miles from the trailhead in the Sierra I think I will go mad.
Technological changes are always ecological, never purely optional. They change expectations, mores, etc.
> I am deeply saddened
If a complete stranger's personal choices about internet access deeply sadden you, you might want to consider some therapy.
It’s the opposite for me and my family, but more so because of safety. I bought my mom a Starlink mini and portable battery because she does a lot of road trips and camping in remote places. Many times there’s no cell reception. If she needed to look anything up or communicate with anyone in those places, there are limited options.
Yes there’s satphones, but then might as well have the entire internet for the same price or less. The $10/mo Starlink standby plan seems well worth it for insurance
Working remote in the desert on a motorcycle is absolute therapy.
Starlink + 60w foldable solar + battery bank in the sidebag of an adventure bike is the meta.
But yes - leave it at home when "getting away from it all".
Me too. But Starlink definitely makes our group more confident when we go camping deep in the forest or mountain. If you are discipline enough to just treat it as a much more capable emergency satellite phone then it's a great addition to your camping kit.
Starlink minis on the dashboards of pickup trucks have become very common recently in some of the more remote western states.
I think a lot of folks underestimate both how large the US is, and how bad high speed cell coverage is, in many of those areas
Binary thinking clouds judgment. Having the ability to access the internet is not itself in opposition to adventuring in the wild.
Considering glamping is getting traction a lot over the last few years, there's probably a lot of people who want to watch movies and such while outdoors.
There are many many uses that aren't camping. People work in places with no cell or wifi doing jobs that require driving or walking or helicoptering in. Then they want access to data to look something up. Geology / oil industry for example.
Yea also, a few years ago I traveled around the entire US with a 4g hotspot and had service in nearly every place I visited, even in many remote national parks. With 5g being significantly faster than starlink, it does seem that this is an incredibly niche product.
Cell service requires radio connectivity to a cell tower, which depends on distance and local terrain. It's quite common to have connectivity on a ridge or mountaintop, but lose it in a valley. Starlink works as long as you can see the sky.
Also 5g speeds in a suburban or urban area are significantly different from the wilderness. I have some property an hour drive from Portland. While some people can get a signal and their phone says "5G", the distance to the cell towers is great enough that actual connectivity is extremely spotty. It takes minutes to download a single photo. Starlink is much more consistent. You actually get better performance if you're farther from civilization.
National parks in the US are pretty well developed, and often crowded. You and I may just travel differently; my preferred camp sites are usually far away from cell coverage.
Indeed. There's plenty of National Forests (not National Parks) with near zero cell service, and often even less once you start venturing into undeveloped BLM land.
One could argue for safety, but there are satellite devices for that.
Travel with family, kids, and work commitments… Starlink unlocks options for those of us who have lives that don’t look like a postcard picture.
I have left jobs that required me to do work that impacted my time with my family. I quit one job while on vacation because my immediate supervisor kept calling me and giving me directions to a hotel business center an hour away from where we were camping.
Unless you run a business that literally requires 24/7 connectivity, it's healthy and fine to step away. If your employer won't respect your time with your family, they don't respect you.
It's up to you to decide if you can live with that. I could not.
I've been contracting for nearly 10 years which means going on holiday costs you a lot more than the actual flights and accommodation. I'll be going camping with my kids for 3 weeks this summer (New Zealand). Starlink is like $350 NZD, absolute no brainer.
But I also agree with parent OPs sentiment - going offline, putting your phone away really connects you back to real world and family. This has been studied ad nauseam. Same as food, substance or any indulgent abuse - it's up to you to control yourself.
> If your employer won't respect your time with your family, they don't respect you.
Why do you assume that OP's employed? And if they are, why do you assume that they can afford to just walk away?
For the first question, op talked about work commitments. So that's not a stretch to assume.
For the second, I get it. Not everyone can. I shouldn't have when I did, but it worked out okay for me after a few months of pain. And I'd do it again in a heartbeat. We had to downsize our lives and I switched to a field I never thought I'd work in. Turns out I love it, and have way more time for my family, even if we can't do massive vacations now.
To me, it's nice to know if you had to connect and get a message out you can. There's also the drive out there and the drive back which can be boring for a passenger with no signal.
I think recent iPhones can send satellite messages as well and it's free.
God forbid anyone should be bored in this day and age. Thank you Starlink!
Yes, that seems very arbitrary to me, while one is not willing to also forgo most other amenities of modern live.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, it's how you take "working remote" to the extreme.
That’s great! You should keep that up.
I found disconnection to be a factor creating hesitation to spend a weekend at a campground out in the north woods. The things I do online are a big part of who I am, and being able to do those things and also go paddling / hiking in the same weekend is wonderful. I don’t think people should worry about the purity of their nature experiences. If someone wants to go full bushcraft, or if they want to blog from a canoe, I wish them the most out of whatever experience they seek. Except generators, I hope they all blow a head gasket.
Don't bring your starlink mini with you.
Then simply don't use it. It doesn't affect you at all then right?
If you live close to nature, but with an Internet connection, isn't that closer to the heart than living far from nature and going camping every once in a while with no connection?
I've taken an Iridium phone when I've been truly off grid (e.g., hundreds of miles from a road, hundreds of miles from cellular service), for me I just liked having a lifeline in an actual emergency.
You don't need to use it. But nice to have.
Why are you focusing on camping though?
I agree with you. As a homeless person who spends a lot of time in these natural places and campgrounds all I see now are people stuck in their vans and RVs with a Starlink antenna on their roof.
I’m going to say this with the knowledge that I will be attacked for it, but since Starlink came to these natural places, I’ve had a more difficult time sleeping. Plus my tinnitus is worse every time it’s around me. I know I am sensitive to electromagnetic fields. They caused me insomnia, tinnitus, and increase my anxiety and episodes of psychosis. I believe this is due to genetic changes I have in my calcium, potassium and sodium ion channels.
I’ve done all the double blind test on this I could and these KU bands really affect me. They spread out over 13 mile hexagonal shape whenever someone has a Starlink running.
When I’m in these places my phone has its data connection turned off, unless I’m doing something like posting on HN complaining about electromagnetic radiation.
The heart of camping is being stranded. Knowing that if you had an emergency there'd be no way to get help. Starlink ruins that.
I've done every kind of camping, all over the world. I take a little Garmin puck with me to ensure I'm never ever stranded in an emergency. I suspect you don't actually go camping.
Agreed. I live in NZ where the rule of thumb is to keep a PLB on your person at all times and time from pulling the PLB to having a SAR helicopter overhead can be as low as two hours (it can be significantly longer depending on weather).
Most people I know who spend significant time outdoors here have one and keep it on our person whenever we're on something more intense than a well marked day hike. This is true of everybody I know from those of us who do 2-3 night backpacking trips between marked campsites to backcountry skiing to mountaineering. It's one of the first things that is advised to tourists here is to borrow one from a gear shop or visitor centre before going into the backcountry.
Here at least it is viewed as common sense safety on the same level as carrying layers and water.
You’re the exception, not the rule when it comes to camping.
I spend well north of 100 days a year in the backcountry in some capacity or another, from day hikes and skis to week+ trips on glaciers in Alaska in the winter being dropped off by plane and where the pickup time/day is "when we can get weather to get back in there" and that would be the same timeline for any kind of SAR response.
I couldn't disagree more with being stranded without communication being the heart of camping. Satellite comms have absolutely increased safety, and allowed for bigger expeditions to be handled. I have multiple mentors a few decades older than me who had friends die in situations that would have likely been recoverable today. I'm not planning on taking a starlink backpacking, but the one on my truck camper has been a transformative tool in how I'm able to recreate.
And the soul of driving is a V8? How about writing software? Is it bugs or compiler errors?
That's because you view those activities as separate from your "normal" life, and those events for you are so short that you can put your entire life on hold to do them
What would you do if you went camping 5x as much?
I’m pretty sure even this v2 is optional to own/bring/use.
I saw a video recently about a silicon valley tech bro who goes hiking with a starlink receiver on his backpack so that he can prompt his agents while he hikes and never lose a single second of vibe coding productivity. It made me want to throw my laptop out of the window.
If they're hiking during work hours, good on them.
If they're working outside of their 9-5, shame on them.
Every year we go to campsites for about 3 weeks. Every year i have the dream to leave my phone at home. I am way too much into tech. Cant live without it. At least not at this point of life.
For me also, and for camping, it's not just for disconnection from work, etc.
There's a very different psychology when you're completely self-reliant, with no communication with civilization. It's hard to express precisely, but it's powerfully liberating and a much more immersive alternative from everyday civilization. The door is shut on other options for a few days, at least.
(Yes, there's risk - though that can be greatly overemphasized and there's risk in everything - and you need to rely on yourself (and your group) to mitigate those risks and respond effectively to them, not on others. One leading trainer I read said that, once you're out of harm's way, the first thing is think. Nothing is going to happen immediately; the ambulance isn't going to be there in 5 minutes; the doctors won't see you for days, at least.)
The risk isn't the focus. It's just you and world around you.
Not everyone can do that - they have responsibilities they can't turn off, they have health challenges, they may want a compromise, like one of those emergency pager devices. I'm saying the effect of actually being disconnected is real, powerful, and valuable.
Sometimes it's not just about having internet at all the places in just the use cases that you can think of or that I can think of.
Connectivity, when and where it's useful, it can be really extremely helpful. [BLANK_AUDIO]
While I generally agree, there is something magical/cool about being in remote wilderness without any signs of civilization, and writing code (or working on somethi technical) in that setting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glamping
I agree. I carry only two things for off-grid camping:
1. My iPhone, which has exactly the right amount of satellite communication for me: SOS and simple two-way texting, only when I actively point it at the right place in the sky, and
2. Aviation band handheld radio as a true last resort. Have one anyway as a pilot, and I figure it's unlikely I'll go more than a few hours without seeing some airliner I can talk to. Illegal to use those bands for this? Technically. Am I worried about the FCC putting me in jail if I'm down to my last fallback to get a critical message out? Nope.
Amazing mindset, so you’d rather risk distracting a pilot and causing an accident than buy a PLB or other emergency beacon for a few hundred bucks as a backup for your phone?
Let's face it, does anyone get rescued on Delta's company frequency? ;)
Half the time I expect when someone throws a genuine emergency out on 121.5 the peanut gallery will all light up screaming that THEY'RE ON GUUUUAAAAARRRRRRDDDDDDD instead of realizing they should shut up and help the poor guy calling for it.
Nearly spit out my airplane coffee and biscoffs reading this. Good to know there are others in the industry on this forum who know about the guard police. Thanks for the laugh!
Fair point. The FAA or pilots might ignore you, but the ATC enthusiasts on Youtube will eventually hear you :)
Not really, if the goals is to maximise getting away, being able to be productive _wile_ on location means you can go, work a bit there, and then be on the trail immediately, you can spend much more time in the mountains than otherwise.
Plus actually working in a nice place like that is in itself a luxury worth the price.
If only this incredible technical achievement could not be linked to such a toxic individual… eh one can only dream, maybe greatness requires a bit of madness.
Wrong audience to make this argument (I do agree).
Au contraire, if you are in general aviation, the last thing you want is to be caught with no radio contact whatsoever while you are stranded. Communication keeps you alive.
I want so badly for starlink to offer a sensible well priced self-service B2B offering with fleet management. Any kind of fixed, high bandwidth IoT device that currently has a SIM card could easily use a starlink. As it stands SMBs who want this have to screw around with residential starlink and live in fear that they’ll get banned.
Not sure if this would cover the use cases you're thinking of, but they have significantly improved management for business customers in the past year or so.
Last year, you couldn't get API access at all unless you went through one of their distributors or spent $1M+/year on Starlink, but now you can use the API [0] as a normal business customer. It's got pretty good telemetry and management features.
[0] https://starlink.readme.io/docs/getting-started
https://starlink.com/business ?
Starlink 'Business' and 'Enterprise' plans are fundamentally different [1]. 1M/yr spend to qualify [1]. A lot of features you expect [3] are not included in normal business plans (or are exclusive to certain units). The segmentation is strange as offering this as 'up-sell' is 100% businesses would pay for. You don't have to take my word on it, as there is a validated market of 'resellers' [2] where you functionally join the reseller's enterprise plan. Paying the 'reseller' a tax to gain access to features starlink fully supports, but simply will not 'sell' to smaller customers, through the reseller's API gateway. It is absurd.
1. https://starlink.com/en-cw/support/article/babe863c-25ec-9df...
2. Peedcast, Marlink, or Peplink
3. where is my ground station, defer updates to a ground station, de/re-activate a ground station remotely, pool usage for all ground stations, remote reboot, all traffic is through a corporate VPN, bound multiple ground stations automatically.
Wow, I really thought there'd be some kind of piecemeal offering that businesses could pay for, but it looks like the most Starlink offers is a flat rate for more data if you burn through your current usage allotment.
SIM? What other provider are you thinking will Starlink allow in their network?
My company has been trying to get T-Mobile to return our calls for nearly a year now regarding any information on their promised IoT solution. Nothing so far.
https://www.t-mobile.com/business/solutions/iot/connectivity...
A reasonably priced routing via satellite links is my dream. I work from NZ on various Salesforce projects (aka enterprise web apps). Ping is usually 200ms or so to the US. Laser interlinks could possibly cut that in half.
Funnily enough, that's on Amazon's LEO feature roadmap.
That's awesome, imagine taking it with you on a Cruise
Good god yes. Those WiFi prices on cruises is absolutely ridiculous unless you get it as part of a good package deal.
Removable battery is cool. Does "quick-swap" mean you can switch the battery while it's operating? I always thought it would be a good idea for devices like this to have a tiny secondary battery or large capacitor in the main unit that would let it keep going for a few seconds while you swap the main battery.
Also curious about this; I'm not much of a tinkerer but I did see their battery has a USB-C port. Is there some efficiency loss in using a spare battery as a power bank rather than actually replacing the battery where it lives?
I would guess that calling it "quick-swap" rather than "hot-swap" probably means no.
And it seems to have a normal USB-C port now! Excellent, having to order that old weird cable of theirs was a pain, especially when one broke out in the wild.
I consider this to be a bit of a downgrade - the Mini 1 would accept anything from 12-48 V without negotiation, which made it really easy to power from a vehicle battery or DC wall power (if you have off-grid solar). If you did want to supply it via USB you just needed a small and cheap "dummy load" to negotiate for a voltage in that range. Now, you have to use a PD supply, and those are very hard to find at 36/48 V (in fact, this is the only single one I'm aware of that will do 60 W: https://www.coolgear.com/product/chargeit-mini-82w-usb-type-... ).
36 volts is strange. But also the power supply you mentioned only outputs 20V max.
Edit: also, this supply is a little strange. The specs say input voltage can range from 24-48V, but the image they have shows an input of 24-28V.
Usb-c to barrel converters are tiny
Starlink Mini improved the power consumption a lot. Does Starlink Mini 2 improve things further? The page lacks specs.
I read elsewhere the battery has 71Wh and lasts 4.5h. That's 15.77W/h if it indeed uses 100% of the battery's capacity.
It's cool but 4.5 hours feels low for what you'd want. Between sometimes not fully charged, degradation, not wanting to fully deplete the battery your average comfortable use-time is going to be more like 2.5-3 hours. A burst of work but an entire half day of work is pushing it. It also competes with your phone hotspot, and is more of an advantage where you dont have cell coverage (more remote - where you are more sensitive to lower battery life because you cant recharge as easily).
Let me reiterate. I think this is actually awesome and I'm sure 4.5hrs is a big accomplishment. Starlink is awesome. I just think for any product you need to discount the stated battery life significantly.
I wouldn't look at the battery as a way of powering the day. Look at it as a way of getting temporary service up and running without having to hunt down a power source. Or seamlessly moving between power sources. Or something that can help buffer from fluctuations in solar output.
I love my mini 1 but occasionally I have to move it around and it's annoying to wait minutes for reconnect if the power cable is adjusted.
Yeah I kinda saw this partially as a few hours of service after the sun goes down not an attempt at all day service.
15 W is the Mini 1's rated "idle" power draw [0], so it's hard to tell if they're just being very generous with the "up to" figure (assuming the dish isn't being used at all) or if efficiency is improved. You'd think they'd mention if it was.
[0] - https://starlink.com/support/article/18836c7e-2d97-6153-fe67...
My mini draws about 40-50w at start then stabilizes at 25w-30w at steady state. I put mini in my backpack next to my laptop with a 86Wh power brick and go hiking.
Phone now has satellite that makes me reachable. In case of emergency I bust out the mini and the laptop and I join the bridge.
This is not in theory, I actually joined emergency calls a few times.
Probably don’t need mini2 at this time. It only removes the power brick for me.
The specs say Mini 2 works with a 60W power brick. Mini 1 requires a 100W source. So at the very least, the peak draw is better.
If you divide Watthours by hours you just get watts not more Watthours.
If it's 71Wh and it lasts 4.5h, the h cancels out and it just becomes 15.78W.
I wanted to get one so bad because I’m a very frequent travelled and the idea of Starlink sounded so interesting
I just checked a few weeks ago and “Roam” does no longer include international coverage at all. Only “Roam unlimited” does, and only for 30 days at a time which entirely defeats the purpose for me. Also no way to replenish this quota or buy additional, you have to go back to your country for it to reset.
My SIM card already gives me 14 days of roaming included, so Starlink is just marginally better for my use case.
I’m sure it’s regulations related but still a bummer :(
Starlink Mini 1st has been on 'clearance' for $149 for a while. Wonder if this is a worthwhile upgrade for truck camping or if the Mini 1 is still a good deal. No indication on price yet?
I've got the OG mini on my truck camper.
I don't see anything here that would meaningfully improve it assuming your truck has a reasonable power situation when it's not running. Mine runs off house batteries in the camper. And for whatever the price difference is from $150 you can buy a much more versatile power bank for camping.
For truck camping it feels like the main upgrade to this version, the built in battery, is unnecessary because you can power it off the vehicle when you need to or have a separate little battery pack power the Mini.
That's exactly how I'm reading it as well. I've got an EV and an auxiliary 3kWh battery and at $149 for the hardware that still seems like a great deal. I'm interested to read about the use cases folks have for the battery to be integrated.
It seems like the launch requires purchasing it with a bundled 1 year subscription for $999. I hope they sell it standalone like the old Mini. I'm planning to pick one up to have as primarily backup internet and just pay the standby fee to have it paused as needed.
They gave me a free mini as a promotion to residential customers. It worked for them, I now have it mounted in my daily driver and pay them ~$27/month more. That's half the price of a mini-only subscription. Standby would be enough for me except that it doesn't work while in motion.
This is great for national park. I've been looking for a portable network device that can be attached in my car for a long time.
I have starlink on my campervan, it is so great for this. Being able to grab hiking maps in the middle of nowhere is awesome!
Got a lot of usage with my Mini when traveling across the southwestern US and Mexico, but they no longer allow travel usage outside US/Canada which is a huge bummer and forced me to switch back to cell coverage which isn’t nearly as good.
Because this is so useful to several industries, governments absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly on what may become fundamental infrastructure. We've already seen what happened in Ukraine.
He has created something that didn't exist a few years ago, and now governments "absolutely cannot let Elon maintain a monopoly" are you saying they need to subsidize competitors or they need to ban Starlink or they need to nationalize Starlink?
Those are the three options for your mandate.
the non-government intervention option is just for Starlink to prove the market, and others can move in. SpaceX is willing to sell them the ride for a decent price, in relative terms.
Honestly its an interesting question.
Fundamentally, I am in the Camp that I fucking hate Musk, I didn't use to. But its undeniable, how influential he is in SpaceX and Starlink in particular.
I remember all the podcasts and haters shitting on him in, I think 2016, when the complete Starlink leadship was fired. We don't know all the details, but it's said that they wanted to do a whole other round of test sats and so on. Musk wanted to push harder on go live sooner. That' seems to have turned out quite well with no major issues in the first generation.
So SpaceX and Musk most certainty deserve a big reward for that. I agree that just rushing into 'its monopoly we must destroy the monopoly' isn't the right approach.
> Those are the three options for your mandate.
Those are not actually the only 3 only options. That's an incredibly narrow minded approach.
I have some idea but I'm sure there are more.
For example, what often works with infrastructure like this is open access rights. What if we can decouple the ground and sats infrastructure.
Allow anybody to build terminals for it. And then potentially eventually even have terminals that can use multiple such systems. I'm not an expert on these systems and how exactly they connect but long term I assume this would be possible. Because that's exactly what "GPS" does today, it connects to like 6 different systems. You could pay SpaceX a one-time fee for that. Or a license per terminal.
Or you could start to establish some standard for laser connectivity in space that eventually everybody can connect to a waste laser data network in space.
You can also make other rules. Like net neutrality, SpaceX isn't allowed to block certain things or do certain things.
Government could also chance its mentality to spectrum and maybe the buy to own spectrum model isn't fantastic.
That said, nationalization is on the table as well. One can make the argument that having multiple such system isn't really worth it. Having one and then giving it out in a different way isn't crazy. SpaceX could still be a transport provider.
Also less controversially, I think the 'monopoly' thing is way worse when it comes to the Ukraine. That is a situation where the government should be clear about how to handle it. We can't have Musk doing his own foreign policy.
Very soon is going to be top1 present for birthday
The upside of Starlink is it’s not easily blockable by a terrestrial nation state; the downside of Starlink is it’s easily blockable by a single fickle trillionaire. That first problem’s been a bear to work around for the entire Internet era, that second one’s gonna be the challenge going forward.
We should just nationalize SpaceX at this point.
People keep saying this, how do you guarantee that Starlink doesn't turn to crap after it is nationalized? No one who calls for nationalization ever has an answer to this.
Frankly, there is the argument that all of this tech and optimization was there for others to develop but no one cared that much and its only now after you and others realize how good it is that you want to just go in and take it "because its so vital to national security".
Furthermore why can't someone just copy them? Drop a ton of money on poaching their engineers and just copy whatever the government needs?
Clearly leadership at SpaceX including Musk are a driving force behind this being so good...just look at the trash all the other companies are peddling. The magic might just go away if its nationalized and if it does then you probably can't just go "oh sorry bro heres your company back pls give us more magic".
Excited to see how the huge cottage industry of people trying to package minis into weapons systems react to this. It looks like it'll be slightly more of a pain in the ass than the previous version but maybe Elon threw the MIC a bone and made them disassemble-able
Yes, this is really a thing, yes, I'm being sarcastic.
Probably half the goal here is to push those people towards the dedicated starshield offering.
I don't think SpaceX offers a bare/stripped OEM version at all. Afaik everyone is just using minis which is fucking insane.
Every other tactical comms vendor offers some sort of bare module/modem assembly for system integration, usually just a modded PCB that's inside their existing offerings with a few different JST connectors instead of whatever giant $500 amphenol twist lock they use.
Would be a great product.. if only Elon would not be involved..
Comrade, what is SKU number for the Ratnik version?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratnik_(program)
I use Starlink on my small boat near shore in PNW - where there is no mobile network, works perfect, DC cable is inconvinience, battery is much more useful imo. Great upgrade
Man, I literally just set up my Starlink Mini about 2 hours ago.
For some reason this page tanks my CPU and slows down my PC to a crawl. On Omarchy/Brave browser.
4.5 hours on battery surprised me - cool that it's built in, but yeah these things are power hungry. 25-35W kinda surprised me.
I guess it makes sense, space is a long way away after all...
Distance alone isn’t the real issue (newer Pixel phones can talk to GEO, which is 100 times farther out than Starlink in LEO!), data rate over distance is.
It's not inherently because of space, it's because phased array antennas are just very power hungry. Most of the link budget is coming from the satellites huge antenna, the mini has a comparatively tiny aperture
They have to be able to actively melt snow too, which makes the draw much higher.
That part is almost certainly optional on the Mini.
would be useful if it could also reverse charge your phone
I'm deeply disappointed in this company's leadership and refusal to continue launching commercial payloads
This is false. SpaceX still plans to launch commercial payloads, but it is shifting these missions from Falcon 9 to Starship. SpaceX has already sold commercial missions for Starship.
When do you think I could subscribe to some service like this, but without funding global fascism? Are the EU based services available for North America?
When an acceptable group can afford a global satellite constellation and get launched. Modern technology is inherently a centralizing force in many ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...
What about centralizing forces causes people to do Nazi salutes on stages, cut off internet to allows, and fund Nazi sympathizers in elections, do you think?