Fun weekend here in geekville. On Sunday I had StarBand installed at the house. If you aren't familiar with starband, or it's competitors, it's a two way internet connection over satellite. Download speeds are up around 600k while upload speeds are a more modest 60-90k. Still, the connection is always active (barring heavy weather or sunspot activity I suppose) and unmetered. In an act of celebration I even downloaded the latest Apple OSX development package: 217meg, which took about half an hour. On my old dialup they'd be up to OS XX before I managed that feat, if ever. Starband also has enthusiastic user groups, www.starbandusers.com

You can see that the dish is a bit bigger than the epidermal entertainment patches (tv dishes) installed on most houses these days. That's probably due to a couple of things: it's used for transmitting back to the satellite, it's also used for receiving tv signals. All told this rig is listening to three separate satellites in space. Quite a setup.

info