Around the beginning of the year, the neighbors across the road decided that they had had enough of the World Wide Wait and signed up for Hughes.net satellite service. The first attempt by the installer didn't work out (he forgot a lot of important parts), and I was busy having troubles of my own at that time. Eventually in early February, the earth station was installed and Tim and Sharon began enjoying the benefits of faster downloads, streaming audio and video. There was some talk at the time of me joining in, but I stayed busy with work and we didn't talk about it again. I also decided that since the service came with a bandwidth limit each month, I would let them explore the hard end of that limit without my help.
Here's where the bits come down from the sky over at their house:
Last month we got together for dinner one night and they offered to let me sip some of the bandwidth available on the system. It took me a few weeks to get my 802.11b gear set up and ready to install, but last Thursday, I made the installation on their house, and threw together some gear over here to receive the signal.
The installation on the side of their house:
The 3" cylindrical tube is an enclosed 14.5 db yagi antenna tuned to 2.4 GHz. It's connected via coaxial cable to a Breezenet radio mounted in the plastic box. A CAT5e cable carries the TCP/IP bits back and forth to/from the satellite radio, and the spare pairs are used to carry 5 volts DC to power the radio. There is a #10 ground wire for lightning protection.
Over here, I hauled out one of my homemade dish antennas and placed it on the roof using a non-penetrating mount held down with cinder blocks. It's pointing through a clearing in the trees, aimed at Tim and Sharon's house:
For now, the radio is tucked up under the eaves with cables strung haphazardly here and there. I did crawl through the entire length of the attic yesterday to pull a CAT5e cable to connect the radio to the computer in the Housetruck. This afternoon, I began working on an enclosure for the radio and associated equipment.
The IP service is OK, it's faster than dialup for web surfing. Not nearly as fast as DSL or cable, but better than two modems and two phone lies bundled. There is a latency between the time you click something and the arrival of the page/image/etc, about 8 seconds or so. You get used to it pretty fast.
The downside is that FTP (transferring files to/from my web site) and SSH terminal sessions (virtual terminal into the server for command-line interface) is way ~slower~ than dial up! In fact the latency makes terminal sessions painfully confusing. I'm sticking with dialup for these essential services on my server.
This isn't the first time I've used satellite IP, I had the use of a Tachyon system for a couple of years, keeping it awake and alive for the owner between it's uses at remote locations. It was an enterprise grade service, the slowest it could get under terms of the contract was 2 MB/s. When the traffic was light, it went up to 10 MB/s. The monthy cost of this service was around $700, so I was grateful to not be receiving the bill for that! Here's a pic of the Tachyon gear set up for a test behind the Crown:
Anyway, now I have the ability to listen to streaming audio (Yay! Ambient background music again!!!) and view web pages I gave up on years back (eBay, for instance, the code there is so bloated that it took 2-3 minutes to load each page over dialup). For the last couple of nights, I've been reading old travel episodes from Rob Gray's Wotthahellisat site, something that was slow enough to make viewing his many excellent photographs difficult before.
So, we'll see how this works out. If I don't invoke the Hughes "Fair Access Policy" (the "bit bucket") and cause the service to slow down due to excess bandwidth, I may tell the phone company to disconnect my second telephone line and give the money instead to the neighbors.
