Dedicated Starlink and mobile 4/5G thread

[VerMonsterRV]

Thanks for the info on Swarm, I hadn't heard of it before. How/why would it be illegal in other countries? And who would enforce that?

Each country has to approve any radio communications, in the USA it is the FCC. Now who would enforce it, it depends. On a radio that has no communication to a service company (like our cab mounted 2m radio, which is also illegal without a license) products like Swarm and Starlink send your position information back to the service company. They know exactly where you are at and if they decide to shut you down due to operating in a country that is not allowed, they could.

 

[palebluewanders]

Each country has to approve any radio communications, in the USA it is the FCC. Now who would enforce it, it depends. On a radio that has no communication to a service company (like our cab mounted 2m radio, which is also illegal without a license) products like Swarm and Starlink send your position information back to the service company. They know exactly where you are at and if they decide to shut you down due to operating in a country that is not allowed, they could.

Ah, that makes more sense. According to this article they added 9 countries last year, so if they keep up the pace they might have decent-ish coverage soon? I do see a lot of boasting about 100% global coverage, so it might be worth asking what they would do if you do happen to drive to a non-approved country.

 

[VerMonsterRV]

Ah, that makes more sense. According to this article they added 9 countries last year, so if they keep up the pace they might have decent-ish coverage soon? I do see a lot of boasting about 100% global coverage, so it might be worth asking what they would do if you do happen to drive to a non-approved country.

One other thing though was the form factor of the tracker. It isn't really built for being mounted outside a truck. It uses a SMA antenna which wouldn't fair well with a small branch. I inquired about remote antennas but other than saying I could experiment they didn't offer much. Not sure why it requires such a large antenna, our Zoleo is the size of a pack of cards and offers 2 way messaging. I'll wait for gen II from Swarm.

 

[clydeps]

I have bought a Swarm unit but not yet mounted it. I'm not so concerned about the form factor, and since it only needs a view of the sky, it should mount in the middle of the roof where it will be protected by surrounding stuff. The antenna is very flexible so will bend to 90 degrees without damage.

I have however been using a homebrew tracking system for some time. I have a Raspberry Pi in the truck which runs the camera system, and I plugged a USB GPS receiver into it and run gpsd to provide the location. A script runs once per minute using crontab and either every 10 minutes or if the vehicle has moved more than 50m, reports the current location and other data to a traccar server I set up. Since I have Starlink and 4G I should get comms pretty much everywhere. The Traccar server provides current location as well as history, and I built a front end onto it to allow the family to see where we are. Current trip shown below.

I can share the script I use to send the data if anyone wants it.