Text 12459, 55 rader
Skriven 2010-11-22 12:10:21 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Satellite Internet (was: N'other one evicted from dyndns?)
==================================================================
Hello Robert,

On Friday November 19 2010 07:56, you wrote to me:

 MV>> Not any more. Not for half a decade. I have seen it work with a 60
 MV>> cm dish. The transmitter is only a few Watts.

 RB> You _do_ surprise me, Michiel. My impression of the situation is in my
 RB> other message to Björn, and I would think an uplink with a transmitter
 RB> of only a few Watts and a 60 cm dish would be so unrealiable as to be
 RB> impractical.

You are obviously not a HAM or you would know that one does not need high power
for a microwave link. The shorter the wave length, the better is the bundeling
effect of a dish antenna.

 RB> Getting such a system aligned with a satellite to begin with would be
 RB> a major operation unless there's some sort of automatic alignment
 RB> system built into the transmitter and dish.

It is no more difficult than aligning a dish for TV reception. Campers do it
all the time...

 RB> Obviously I believe you when you say this works,

It works. The first time I saw it in operation was at the yearly hamfest. That
system had two 60 cm dishes, one for receive and one for transmit. That was
about 7 years ago.

Three years ago, a fellow ham came along with a one dish system. Also 60 cm.
(For our friends in the USA, that is 20 inches). He parked his camper right in
front of me. Put up a tripod with the dish, aligned it with the sat finder,
plugged in the cables and that was that. Took him less than 10 minutes and he
had TV, phone and internet.

He lives in a bit of a remote area in Germany where DSL or cable is not
available.  So he uses the system at home as well. He is Dutch and married to a
German woman. The satellite company gave him a Dutch phone number, so he can
call his family in The Netherlands at low cost, and equally importtant, they
can call him at the cost of a national phone call.

It works, I have seen it work, I even had my own laptop plugged in. Admittedly,
it is not as blindingly fast as fiber. But it competes well with DSL.

 RB> but somehow I have trouble accepting such a thing as a practical
 RB> solution for the "man in the street" without special technical skills.

I have to admit that HAMs are above the man in the street regarding technical
skills. But it really is not all that hard to set up.


Cheers, Michiel

--- GoldED+/W32-MINGW 1.1.5-b20070503
 * Origin: http://www.vlist.org (2:280/5555)