I’m not an Elon Musk fanboy but I don’t dislike him either…. I do respect him for coming up with some cool stuff and then having fun with it. The idea of a notebook-sized satellite dish to get you internet in literally any part of the world is something that was virtually unthinkable a decade or two ago.

For survivalists, one of the great headaches has always been finding a balance between living in the sticks, or even ‘off grid’, but still maintaining some type of communication with other humans…especially your fellow like-minded individuals. Most ‘bugout locations’ are short on things like powerlines and phone lines. The reliable standby has been ham radio, which has its ups and downs…there is no one perfect solution. I remember years ago that there were things like ‘packet radio’ and other radio/internet hybrids. Nowadays you just drop a Starlink on the ground in a clear area and start downloading porn. We’re living in the future.

My needs are quite simple. I’d like to have email and VoIP for voice communication. I’d also like to access Google Earth, get the news, and that sort of thing. Additionally, I’d like to have some internet-connected cameras for real-time viewing. While Starlink appears to be able to do that, the issue of powering the darn thing reliably over time is the new constraint. I need to have a battery system in place that would give me as much time as possible between  charges in case I need a few weeks to get up there. I suppose I could steal an RTG from the arctic somewhere but that seems like a lot of work.

I’ll be exploring solutions but before that I need numbers. So, after unpacking the box from FedEx, I have the Starlink setup in my yard running off a small lithium battery block. This particular power supply is Bluetoothed to my phone so I can track battery life as Starlink is out there doing its thing. Then, once I figure out average usage demands and whatnot I can start scaling a battery system. Yes, of course Im going to integrate some solar panels for charging…but I need some numbers so I can calculate needs and build in extra margins. In a perfect world I’d like to have enough panels up there to charge a battery that is capable of running the thing for a solid month.

And, as I am discovering, the internet is awash with all sorts of third-party items for this little piece of tech. Notably adaptors to let you run on Milwaukee and DeWalt power tool batteries. Thats rather convenient since I’ve got a bunch of them sitting around.

The subscription side of the StarLink equation got squared this week. You can put your subscription into a sleep mode when youre not going to be using it for a length of time and that drops your monthly sub to five or ten bucks. I went with their cheapest monthly plan which is about sixty bucks. I then dumped some money into a new brokerage account, bought a bunch of weekly dividend ETFs, set the brokerage to automatically move the dividends to a new checking account at the end of the month, and then StarLink bills the debit card attached to that account. Basically, a fire and forget arrangement.

My plan was to head up to the Beta Site this weekend and experiment with the StarLink but its raining pretty heavy and I really don’t feel like negotiating heavily rutted muddy roads. And…Im too lazy to go drag the SxS out of storage. So today will be spent on other Beta-Site-related projects. Most notably, I need to put together a secure container kit to put all the StarLink gear in for transit, I need to start calculating power needs, and another one or two projects I’ll post about in a few days.