Starlink app shows how good my view of the northern sky is

I live in a rural area near Salem with crappy CenturyLink DSL the only broadband option -- if you can call about 7 mbps download and 1 mbps upload "broadband."

CenturyLink has told me that they are going to bring fiber optic broadband to our neighborhood exactly never. 

And fast 5G wireless likely will be available in our area in the wilds of Oregon (six miles from the Salem city limits, the state capital, but it might as well be six hundred miles) at about the same time -- almost never.

So Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network is my best bet to avoid internet depression. I follow Starlink news on Twitter and was thrilled to see an Ars Technica story today, "Space X Starlink public beta begins: It's $99 a month plus $500 up front." 

SpaceX has begun sending email invitations to Starlink's public beta and will charge beta users $99 per month plus a one-time fee of $499 for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. The emails are being sent to people who previously registered interest in the service on the Starlink website. One person in Washington state who got the email posted it on Reddit. Another person who lives in Wisconsin got the Starlink public-beta invitation and passed the details along to Ars via email.

SpaceX is calling it the "Better Than Nothing" beta, perhaps partly because the Starlink satellite service will be most useful to people who cannot get cable or fiber broadband. But the email also says, "As you can tell from the title, we are trying to lower your initial expectations."

Well, those lower expectations sound pretty damn good to me: 50 to 150 Mbps, so vastly faster than my 7 Mbps. Back in June I signed up for updates on the Starlink web site. I'd like to be a public beta tester, though the chance of this is slim. 

As a consolation prize, the Ars Technica story mentioned Apple and Android Starlink apps. I eagerly downloaded the version for my iPhone. The main thing it does for me currently (actually, the only thing it does) is show how obstructed the view is of the northern sky. 

This afternoon I climbed up on our roof and sat down in various places on the ridgeline. A ridgeline placement looks to be the easiest to install, according to two PDF files I found via some Googling.
Download Ridgeline_Mount_Guide.pdf | DocDroid
Download Volcano_Mount_Guide.pdf | DocDroid

Here's how an unobstructed view of the northern sky looks on the Starlink app. I took this screenshot from Lake Drive, the road our house in on.

Unfortunately, there were trees inside the bottom part of the circle from every point on our roof's ridgeline that I tested for an unobstructed view of the northern sky. That's the bad news.

The good news is that since we live on ten acres, we own all of the obscuring trees. Three tall firs and two large oaks. I forgot to take a screenshot from our roof, but here's photos of the trees from an elevation that is fairly close to the height of the ridgeline.

The three firs in the middle and middle right of the photo are quite a ways from our house. The two oak trees partially obscuring the rightmost fir tree are much closer. Below is a photo of the trees that focuses on them.

Hopefully we won't have to cut down the trees. Mostly our view of the northern sky through the Starlink app is clear. So when it's possible to order Starlink, my plan is to set up the dish on our roof, hook it up to the router, and see what happens. 

If we can't connect to the Starlink satellites, or have a poor connection, then I'll call Elwood's Tree Service and have them take down the two oaks. Since they're close to our house, it makes sense to remove them to reduce the wildfire risk. If there's still a poor connection, I lean toward removing the fir trees one at a time.

My wife and I are tree lovers. However, large trees fall down frequently on our ten natural acres from wind, snow/ice, or old age. We're fortunate to have many large firs, oaks, and other types of trees on our property. Even so, cutting some or all of these five trees down isn't my first choice. 

It just is extremely frustrating to have such a slow Internet connection. Some days our DSL slows markedly, making it difficult to do anything on the Internet. Streaming movies on Netflix or other services is problematic. Usually we can do this, but not always. 

Maybe as Space X puts more Starlink satellites into orbit, the need for a totally unobstructed view of the northern sky will lessen. We are a bit south of the 45th parallel, so within the 44 to 52 degrees north latitude that will reportedly be the first rollout of the Starlink system. 

I can hardly wait.

Comments

[Skyline]

"If we can't connect to the Starlink satellites, or have a poor connection, then I'll call Elwood's Tree Service and have them take down the two oaks. Since they're close to our house, it makes sense to remove them to reduce the wildfire risk. If there's still a poor connection, I lean toward removing the fir trees one at a time."
Hu...Hu...HuWATTTT????
You're going to murder those perfectly innocent trees just so you can flitter your time away on the time-waste-central internet?
Have you ran this by Peter Fernandez, Dan and Richard Gatti??????
Seems like I recall you're push to erect a hanging platform at city hall for these guys recently for "murdering" poor, innocent trees.
Oh and P.S.:
I'll fall the trees for free if I can have the firewood.
Hugs and kisses xoxoxoxo

[William Fouste]

I also live in a rural area (Washington County). So, I also was excited to read the news yesterday about Starlink. However, unlike you, while we live too far from the "central office" for DSL, we have a cell phone tower a mile away, and we have a WiMAX connection to a tower on the Chehalem Mountains. It uses a dish to connect with a "line-of-sight" alignment to the tower. We pay $100 a month for a maximum of 11 Mbps with a 300GB data cap.

The dish (the size of the original Directv dish) is a 100 feet from the house at the only location on our property with an unobstructed, line of sight view of the tower. As a fellow tree lover, you might consider a ground location for the Starlink dish. While I don't know the technical details of the Starlink dish connection, it is possible you could bury a conduit to the dish location and run any cables required through it.

We also have a landline with a new phone company, ZIPLY Fiber. The new company bought Frontier's NW operations. With a background in internet connections, and the word fiber in the name, I am hoping they eventually will run a fiber optic line on their poles. Perhaps even before I die, or have to move into town (I am 71).

While Amazon is also planning a low-orbit satellite service, I don't know if the two services will provide us with broadband (FCC definition: 25 Mbps) before DVD.COM dies. Are you still a subscriber? Have you noticed that the discs are now being mailed from the original (1997) location: San Jose? Blu-ray discs have superior video and sound quality over regular streaming quality. They also are probably going to disappear. All the more important reason that we rural dwellers have a broadband connection.

By the way, as an independent film fan, of the 496 movies in my Queue, only 19 are available for streaming on Netflix.

It is too bad we are atheists, Brian. Otherwise we could be praying every day for a broadband solution. Of course, you and I know that still wouldn't speed up our "internet salvation"!

[Brian Hines]

William, since we're surrounded by large trees, I doubt that a ground location for the Starlink receiver would provide a better view of the sky than a roof location. But I'll see if this is true. Thanks for the suggestion.

We don't have a line of sight to cell towers. A company similar to the one you mentioned came out to check our signal strength from their cell tower location. They got on the roof and even used a drone to check out the top of a big fir tree on the south side of our house.

No luck. No line of sight. Even from the top of the tree. Also, I communicated with a local fiber optic company about what it would take to get fiber optic to our neighborhood of several hundred homes. Answer, several hundred thousand dollars, maybe $400,000 if I recall correctly. So that was ruled out.

Like you, we still use Netflix/DVD.com It's good to have a DVD on hand for the times our DSL speed is so unusually crappy, beyond its usual crappiness, Netflix won't stream correctly -- starts and stops, which is annoying.

You're right. Our DVD queue is like yours. Very few movies available for streaming, maybe because many are several years old, or older. Maybe when/if Joe Biden wins and the Dems control the Senate, Biden and company will bring fiber optic to underserved areas of American.

Which includes, like I said, our area six miles from the city limits of Oregon's state capital, not exactly Outer Mongolia. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Outer Mongolia had faster broadband than we do.