Here are a couple photos of the satellite dish which is now providing broadband services for our farm. I am actually regretting not using this when we lived in Seattle. In Seattle, I was too far from the phone company CO for standard DSL and was not a cable subscriber (got the local broadcast channels just fine) so we used IDSL which is based on the older ISDN technologies but using DSL signaling. I was opting for a few extras (eight static IP addresses, web hosting, etc...) but the monthly bill in Seattle was around $180 and the performance wasn't especially great - 144 up and down. (a bit more than twice as fast as the optimal dialup and about half the speed of a basic DSL connection) Oh yes, there was a $200 up-front fee for the equipment.
With Starband, we paid about $700 up-front fee and $200 for the install ( the dish contains a transmitter so it has to be done by an FCC licensed tech) The monthly fee is about $80. The service so far is fantastic - uploads regularly clock in around 100 - less than IDSL but not by much. Downloads run 400 to 600, very very nice! There is a large latency problem - it takes the signal just under a second to travel up 23,000 miles to the satellite and then 23,000 miles back to the Starband earth station but this is acceptable for casual browsing.
Here is the dish:
And here is a closeup of the head:
The pod underneath the arm contains the transmitter, the receiver is on top toward the back. The 'plumbing' is the waveguide which maintains the proper signal polarization and directs the transmitted signal toward the dish and not into the receiver where it would swamp it. The system runs at 12 GHz.
Very cool stuff...
And here is a closeup of the head:
The pod underneath the arm contains the transmitter, the receiver is on top toward the back. The 'plumbing' is the waveguide which maintains the proper signal polarization and directs the transmitted signal toward the dish and not into the receiver where it would swamp it. The system runs at 12 GHz.
Very cool stuff...
