I'm new to the concept of satellite internet. What I want to so is have a system that several RVer's can share. I would like to put a dish on a trailer and put a pc inside the trailer, something that can be towed anywhere in the US and lower Canada, and used behind several RVs.
But some of the RVer's aren't very technically oriented. I need advice to know what the best satellite and ISP would be particularly based on the ease of use and durability. Also, is the idea of a dish on little trailer a practical idea?
DirectWay dishes are installed by professional installers. The reason is that this is not just a pizza dish receiver. It's a transmitter. Point it at the wrong satellite (bird) and you'll knock some other service off the air. That's exactly what happened when Gilat (Starband) first appeared and did a few customer self-installs. Installs were halted until the existing installation were corrected.
DirectWay and Starband are muttering about going to spot beams. That means the same codes and signals will be re-used in different geographic areas. There's no guarantee that your code will be available in a different part of the country. In other words, moving around may not be a great idea.
I'm not a big fan of satellite due to the large latency (800msec) typical, restricted download capacity, and restricted upload speed. However, if that's all you can get, it's still far better than dialup.
No. The birds are spaced 3 degrees apart. You need about 1 degree of positional accuracy to maintain a decent signal. Anything that moves, shakes, rattles, or drifts, is not going to work. Think big steel pipe imbedded in concrete or attacked to a solid rooftop. There are pizza dish *RECEIVERS* that track the satellites for RV's and boats. However, these are for receivers, not for transmitters. To the best of my knowledge, tracking antennas cannot be used with Directway (you might call their support line and double check).
I don't know if Starband uses spot beams, but when they lost a bird recently, they made something available to reprogram the ground unit to use a different satellite. They called my friend and talked him through downloading something via dialup access so he could get Starband back.
Argh. I'm wrong again. When I last talked to the local Starband reseller, he insisted that he was not allowed by Directway to do mobile installations. However, that was about 3 years ago. I should have checked Google first:
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minutes to find the bird using GPS. Impressive. Thanks for the correction.
It's certainly in the future to handle additional capacity via frequency reuse. If deployed, it will limit the area that a mobile satellite broadband user can travel.
Drivel: Gone to sulk. Two screwups in two days is not good.
That was certainly true initially. Things change, though.
Not necessarily. 802.11b with WEP could be thought to be spot beams as well. When you travel to another spot, you might need to do nothing, you might need a different access code. You might pay more for RV-roaming satellite service than fixed service, just like T-Mobile offers a regional and a national pricing plan.
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