Shedding Load or May the 4th be with you

The reason for action was a spam email from Starlink.  I had looked at Starlink some years ago but never went ahead.  But the spam said that through the end of April they had a special offer to try Starlink for $35 per month for four months.  It rises to $50 per month after that.  So I signed up on April 23rd.  It took a while but the antenna/receiver, power supply and router with cabling arrived at the ferry dock on Saturday May 2.

It was a long bicycle ride to the ferry and back so I just let the surprisingly heavy box sit until Sunday May 3.

  Actually opening the box was quite a chore.  Starlink uses boxes like Mouser - no tape is employed, they must hot glue the tabs of the box lid.  Then you are supposed to rip off the pre-perf strips but they break - it would have been quicker to use a knife or scissors !

Anyway, once open there is a big pictorial diagram of how things go together.

  It wasn't too hard to hook up.  Luckily I had a hole in the side of the house and up through the living room floor (from the old TV coax and rotor cable) which were just big enough for the cabling.  For now I set the antenna on an old stock tank and weighted down the antenna with a rock.

someone needs to buy some Rustoleum

  I assumed that the antenna should be pointed south but nope, it needs to be pointed almost due north at a clear patch of sky.  In the app there is a pointing feature but it would have been much easier if they had printed instructions that said:  first, point it north  :)

One other weird thing, there is a status LED on the router but it goes out after an hour - the two LEDs on the power supply are on all the time.

led on router (front) present at powerup

.

but the LED goes off after an hour

One somewhat surprising thing: Starlink seems to power up in a matter of seconds.  There were 5 power blips here the morning of the 4th, I found out that the batteries in my uninterruptable power supplies are kaput so the Starlink had to reboot multiple times. With Frontier DSL this can take what seems like a LONG time, well over a minute.  Starlink is up in seconds.

Finally the Starlink antenna "sings" to itself - not sure what that's about - is it a power supply or ?  If the weather calms down I'll try to record an mp3:  

https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZvXWO5ZwaxSw2ClgoREjYL43EOfN81mA1z7

Starlink seems to work at least as well as the Frontier DSL.  So much so that on May 4th I decided to shed my Frontier internet service.  This was actually not that painful, took less than 15 minutes on the phone.  Comic relief:  the Frontier rep tried to switch me to Verizon 5G internet service but then she checked and of course it's not available here.  She offered a lower price on the current DSL but that just kinda irritated me so shed it is - May 5th is my last day of service with Frontier internet.  I will keep the landline phone for at least another month while I try to get the phone number switched over to a cell phone.  But in June the long local nightmare of Frontier/Verizon will be over for me :)

The Electric Co-op on the island offers fiber but that's not something that you can install yourself in minutes.  Plus I *think* it costs over $100 per month - since I don't need huge bandwidth I never looked into it fully.

In some ways I do feel a little bad quitting Frontier even though I'll be getting as good or better service for 1/2 the price or less.  The reason ?  I was actually able to retire before I reached 40 years of age due to my employment at GTE which used to provide local telephone service here.  But then I remember that I will be saving something like $100 per month ? :)

Inertia is present in both mass (in physics terms) and in old people like me (in figurative terms)  :) 

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm