Starlink now available on lakes, seas, and oceans all around the world | Hacker News Reader

Starlink now available on lakes, seas, and oceans all around the world

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44 pointsmfiguiere14 comments

I lived and worked (as a coder) on a boat for a number of years. I used long range wifi to steal internet from cafes, LTE, and for worst case, satellite internet (insanely expensive, just for emergencies, back in 2014-6).

A lot of my time was spent messing about keeping internet. Whenever the boat moved around I had to move the high gain wifi antenna. LTE at the time was great but small data caps.

For ~$6k a year it's a total game changer.

If I didn't have kids now I'd buy a boat again and do it in a heartbeat. Hell if I can afford it, maybe if my company exits, I'll jump at it with the kids.

It's the future folks, and it's freaking awesome

What type of antennas did you use? Asking for a friend...

Good question. I tested heaps. The winning design by a landslide was a metal plate reflector, with essentially two diamonds around 15mm in front of it, side by side, apx 15mm on the edge.

I thought it was called a 'butterfly antenna', but web searching now I don't think that's correct.

I built one for a friend just with wire and pliers. The tolerances mustn't have been that important because it worked well.

Maybe someone on here knows the name of that antenna design?

Something like this? - https://www.tindie.com/products/agrf/ultra-wide-band-04-3ghz...

Did you try Parabolic antennas modified for WiFi or did your space constrains did not allow for it?

If you look at maritime traffic [1], the size of the market becomes clear.

I guess pretty much any boat will instantly buy it. There's just nothing comparable and even with smaller crews, it's well worth it. It makes communication with vessels much easier, in addition to the advantages for the crew.

I wonder if cruise ships will install several of those to provide internet to all passengers?

[1] https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...

If you're just going sailing for a few months a year and you're not working remotely while onboard, it may be a tough sell.

> Pay As You Go

> Starlink Maritime offers the ability to pause and un-pause service at any time, and is billed in one month increments, allowing users to customize their service to their individual needs.

So you'd only be out the $500 or whatever for the dish when you're not using the service. Given maritime pricing on things, that's cheap. (As everyone knows, BOAT stands for break out another $thousand.)

It depends of course, but generally marine equipment is extremely expensive and if you want maps for navigation/fishing with different data like tides, fishing areas and many others, you'll pay a yearly subscription for that map region, and it ain't cheap either. And that's just for maps. Add to this some cloud monitoring service that also will cost something.

So they have enough laser interconnects now that it works even offshore?

Looks like a screenshot from some sci-fi movie:

https://satellitemap.space/?constellation=starlink

Sweden, Norway, and Finland seem to not have any coverage based on this map.

That’s a pretty cool site, delightfully functional on mobile.

https://starlink.sx/ is also pretty awesome.

Any way you look at it, this is pretty amazing.

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