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Comment by cprayingmantis | Hacker News Reader

If anyone from Starlink or SpaceX is reading these comments here’s what you want to do: Sell your own branded trail cam with solar charging and LTE from orbit. You can charge $25-$40 a month for unlimited pictures sent from the cam. This would open up hunters, nature enthusiasts, and researchers to be able to place their hardware anywhere in the field without worrying about connectivity. Here in SWVA we have deep hollows that can’t get LTE without dense tower coverage that we don’t have the population to justify, but you can grab a satellite connection.

After writing this out I’m beginning to doubt the market would be big enough but I know at least 20 people with 2 or more LTE cams for deer season.

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I work with researchers that deploy all sorts of solar powered sensor equipment in remote parts of New Zealand. Realistically Starlink would need to support NB-IoT and LTE-M which is what these kinds of devices are moving towards (if they need cellular connectivity). These are low power variants of 4G and 5G.

Even if you have solar and a fixed platform, you usually want to deploy as little solar as possible. Especially if you need to carry the gear on foot. So minimising power consumption is really important.

Ridiculously niche comments from experts like this is why HN is so special. Thank you.

No problem. It’s also why I love HN.

> This would open up hunters,

Christ what more do you guys need to shoot a rabbit.

Agreed. As an avid hunter/angler I've been trying to make things more difficult the last few years instead of easier. At some point the trail cams start making people look more like butchers IMO. Similarly in the fishing world, tools like Livescope are becoming deeply embedded in the community.

For me, the draw of the woods and rivers is the chance to disconnect from technology and reconnect to nature.

Hunters observe wildlife. They don't just shoot wildlife whenever they feel like it.

i guess they were confused by the giant rifle attached to their "observing" scopes

My in-laws live in your county, and Starlink is the only Internet that actually works. Thankfully the TN side runs fiber on the power poles.

Additionally, Starlink was a complete lifesaver during Helene.

Isn’t tree cover a problem for propagation of wavelengths used in satellite comms?

>Direct to Cell works with existing LTE phones wherever you can see the sky.

No new antennas implies we're in the 1-6 GHz region. Should be fine?

Having had starlink before, yes. I needed a direct line of sight to the sky to receive service.

This service uses a different radio link using LTE. That’s why you don’t need the dish. They had to launch new satellites with the extra radio gear. So your past experience is not necessarily representative.

Lte antennas of almost arbitrary length exist

Interesting idea. I can build this and open source it. I imagine there is equivalent hardware over LTE already?

$25-$40 is insane. Spypoint offers 250 pics for free a month and 1000 for $6 a month. As long as you can connect to a cell tower (1 bar is enough). That probably covers 80 % of hunt properties.

https://www.spypoint.com/en/spypoint-experience/plans

At least in the Western United States, most hunting is done on publicly owned land, and there's enormous swaths of public land with absolutely zero cell phone coverage.

In Finland, i get 5Mbps LTE uplink for EUR 4 per month, for a trailcam, with unlimited use (at least in principle). So $20 per month sounds expensive, but obviously there are places where one has no earthly LTE and then it could be justified.

In general, having low-bandwidth Starlink IoT connections globally accessible would be just great, I can see lots of usage.

Finland is fairly flat and has _excellent_ LTE coverage. Being in Norway myself, which isn't flat, but still has fantastic LTE coverage for political reasons, I do often find myself thinking like you, and need to be reminded of how abysmal coverage is in rural North America (and even in for example rural Germany).

Current US mobile coverage and prices are like europe in 2002

This could also be a hardware startup. If only there were some entrepreneur types around...

Presumably there's a market for this in other niches, e.g. weather monitoring, defense/border monitoring, etc... The question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Where's the really valuable data?

I recall not too long ago a startup advertising exactly this idea for farms. It was some box with various sensors (and output lines) that you could configure to do a multitude of tasks

As long as it doesn't need near-real-time viewing (or if it does, said viewing can be billed for as a separate per-user fee), it wouldn't cost anything extra to SpaceX in the sense that those cameras could use free capacity, only transmitting when nothing else is.

Surf cam would be amazing too. Just tie a solar, starlink cam to a pier and check in.

I see a lot of surf cams online, are those usually custom hardware?

Ten years ago I installed one cam for Surfline and at that time it's was an off-the-shelf but expensive outdoor camera (stock firmware) connected to a locally-based broadband.

The only one in my area wants a subscription fee :-(

I guess they need to contract with businesses or parks? It would be cool to buy a cheap one and just tie it to a tree or something.

Off grid cabins could use this too.

Nah, those should use a proper Starlink dish.

Direct to cell bandwidth is obviously very limited.

A proper starlink dish requires real power, which isn’t reliable in an off grid situation.

You need very little bandwidth because there is typically not a lot happening at a remote cabin.

iot is coming next year so you can do all you want then

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