Starlink failed me when I was in the field, but maybe not for the reason that you're thinking. There was a global outage when I was in the field when I was on my camping trip, but it failed me for another reason. Also, let's check it out. A group of us just returned from Colorado. We spent the last five nights camping outside of Uhray, Colorado in Ridgeway State Parks, actually closer to Ridgeway, Colorado, which is a smaller town than u Ray, but Ray, Ridgeway, and Montrose all kind
of right there together. We spent the last week camping there. The first night we were there was a Sunday night, and I actually live stream from my phone with AT and T that night. Had a really good connection, really good signal, really good live stream. I went live for about an hour, had no problems at all, but shortly after that it became an issue. Somebody asked if I
was using starlink. No, I'm actually on AT and T. I did a speed test and I got a out thirteen to fifteen megs down, but I got forty megs up, so that worked out great. We were on AT and T, robbers on rob was on Verizon that was Sunday night. When that happened the next day, Monday, it still worked pretty good. By the time Tuesday got here, it had
slowed down, and Wednesday and Thursday were almost unusable. We had all started recording videos, not live streaming, but recording videos and for to post for later edited use on all of our channels. And some of it might have been that we were uploading a lot of stuff. I don't know, but it seemed to be consistent everywhere, not just in the park, but when we'd go out on a peak, we would drive through a valley, drive through between mountains, there'd be no signal, and when we got
up on a peak there would be signal. It would work for a while until we left, and then we would go back down the valley, go back to campsite, and even just watching when even when no one was watching it all, no one was uploading it all. I should say, the speeds never got back to where they were the first two days we were there. So Thursday was our last full day there. Friday morning we got up, packed up and left, and Thursday I pulled out my starlink.
Actually the day before that, I was using Hobby's Starlink and Starlink worked great right up until they had a global network outage that lasted like two to four hours something like that. So I decided to make this video based mostly on this latest comment. This is not the first comment I've ever received like this, Okay, I talked about Sterlink the last time I was on Randy not A Rubacon's channel. I've done interviews with Jay Christina as well.
He's been on my channel. I've been on his. So this guy on my on my best four HT video says, when Sterlink supports mobile phones, why are we still using him? And I replied and I said, Sterlink had a worldwide outage about three days ago. Do you still have questions besides the global network outage? When I booted up that Starlink dish on Thursday morning, my own Starlink dish on Thursday morning, after using hobbies the day before, it never would serve up an SSID for Wi Fi. I never
could connect to it via Wi Fi. I never could get it to show up inside of the Starlink app on my phone. I rebooted the dish two or three times. I let it run for thirty minutes the last time and it never served up an SSID, So from my perspective, it had hardware failure. It failed because I couldn't connect to it and use the Internet. And then if we go over here, we're gonna see what Jay Christina has to say about it.
I covered a similar type of situation. I think it was a year or two back, where this is some administrators or someone internal to SpaceX forgot to pay the bill for their cert for their secure.
A similar city. He's talking about a similar situation, a similar global outage that happened with Starlink in the.
Past certificate which allows them to communicate securely between each other, and once that certificate died, well, access died over.
On routers dot Com is talking about this outage, which happened on July twenty fourth. SpaceX's Starlink satellite network was back up and running on Friday as engineers hunted for a root cause of its biggest international outage the night before, a rare disruption for the powerful Internet system set off by an internal software failure. Users in the US and Europe began experiencing outage around three pm Eastern Time Thursday. According to down Detector, a crowdsourced funded and it reported
sixty one thousand users being down. Now what does that mean? What does that mean? It means that with Starlink, just like a cell phone network, you are reliant and dependent on external hardware and external networks being up and running. With a radio gmrs, CBE Radio, HAMM radio, once you purchase the radio, you've got free access to it from now on. Starlink is gonna stop working if you forget to pay the bill or if for whatever reason and your credit card has declined. If you don't pay the bill,
you don't have Starlink. Currently at the time of this recording, is fifty dollars a month for fifty gigs, or it's like one hundred and thirty five or one hundred and fifty five a month for unlimited, whatever it is. They've changed it. When I signed up, it was like one twenty five for unlimited, and they've gone up on the
price two three times since then. Currently, I have the fifty gigabyte plan because I'm only using it periodically right now, but you can pause that also if I put it on pause and don't want to use it this month and I don't have Starlink at all, and I have to unpause it. So if you don't pay for Starlink, you don't pay the bill. You are without communications. If they have a global outage, if they have a regional outage, if they have a nationwide outage, something that's completely out
of your control, out of my control. You don't have communications. So what do you do? Well, hopefully you have a radio license of some sort, even if that is a free band MERZ FRS, Marine band, CBE radio license. Hopefully you have a radio license of some sort. And if you need help getting your Ham Radio license, I highly recommend Ham Radio Prep. Ham Radio Prep has a ninety nine point four I think success rate ninety nine point four percent success rate. If you don't pass your exam
on the first tribe, they will refund your money. You can save twenty percent off of all of their courses Technician, General and Extra, and a bunch of courses on top of that about HF Basics, HF Masterclass, Balfang Basics, a couple other MCom They got a new InCom class, they're coming out with a new class leader this year as well. Twenty percent off of all of those classes with the coupon code of Jason twenty highly recommend Ham Radio prep.
They are sponsoring today's video, so thank them. Check out the link in the description below. But you are dependent on you if you think so so that like this guy who wrote this comment a minute ago that I read to you, when starlink support supports mobile funds, why are we still using Ham? Well, because basically it's free. Ham radio is free. Yes, you have to buy the Ham radio. We have to buy the starlink too. Guess
what I've bought three Starlink dishes. Okay, I bought the original, I bought the new panel dish, but I never used the new panel dish, and then I bought the mini okay, And all of those packages were five hundred and ninety nine dollars when I bought them. And how long are they gonna last? A lot of the people are not even using Gen two anymore. Gen two. You can get a Gen two dish for like one hundred and fifty
bucks now, but how long are those gonna last? They keep upgrading the network in the in space and upgrading the satellites. Okay, so starlink dish that you buy today in four, five, six, eight years is going to be like a smartphone that you buy today, it's gonna be
kind of useless. It's my prediction. Anyway, I can take a Ham radio that I purchased in nineteen ninety two, nineteen ninety seven, or if I had one that was actually built in nineteen sixty five, I could take that Ham radio and get on the air and communicate with it today for no money at all. So Starlink is not a replacement for radio. Again, I must reiterate, because I know there's a lot of fans. There's a couple fanboys that come along every time I make a Starlink video. Well,
obviously you made a mistake. Obviously this is user error. I'm like, a global outage is not user error, Okay. Booting up my dish and leaving it sit for thirty minutes and it never serving up an SSID is not user error. Okay. Because I got Starlink support to confro, they're like, oh, yeah, we see what you're saying. They're like, we see your dishes offline. Plug it back in. You do need a firmware update, which the starlink will update itself every time you boot it up and get a
connection to the sky with it. It'll just do automatic updates. But I left it running for thirty minutes, never served up an SSID, couldn't connect to it with my phone or laptop, couldn't see an SSID when I scan for Wi Fi from my phone, my tablet, and my laptop three different sources. Was not available, had to contact support, did not get it working for a whole twenty four hours because we were out that day and I was without I was basically without internet, without a way to communicate.
The day before that was the outage, and then my hardware failed. So yeah, your hardware can fail. Sure, I can have a ham radio on the field that it can fail too. Sure, that's very true. There's always a failure point somewhere. That's why I have multiple points of communications. Why do we still need to use ham radio if mobile phones in Starlink are soon going to cover globally worldwide? Well, Number one, I've already answered that it's not Number one.
Number one, I've already answered that, thank you for watching the video. Number two. Number three points, okay, is that you got to buy a mobile phone. You gotta make sure it doesn't fail. You got to connect to Starlink, pay your bill to make sure it doesn't fail, and even then it still might have a worldwide outage, which is rare. Which is rare. What if you're in the
canopy cover of a forest or trees. Okay, we camp every year at Montasano State Park on the side of a mountain in Huntsville, Alabama for a ham radio show for Huntsville Hamfest. Hope to see you guys there in August of twenty twenty five. There's no starlink service up there, buddy. They've got thirty forty foot tall trees that blanket that entire state park. It's a beautiful area, absolutely beautiful state park. Love the trees, love the shade, great area, No starlink,
no cell signal because the trees block it all. Well, the cell signals because they don't have a good tower up there. But there's no starlink because it can't get clear line of sight to the sky. And this might be true everywhere. We camped in Grand Canyon about three years ago. No clear line of sight to the sky, no starlink, no working and radio will work everywhere. GMRS
and CBE radio will work everywhere. And once you have the hardware, you don't have to pay for service every month that you have to worry about failing because all it requires is a battery and atmosphere, and the atmosphere is free for everybody. So no, Starlink is not a replacement for ham radio. It's not a replacement for any radio, but that doesn't mean it's not worth having if you want to sign up for starlink. This is not a sponsored part of the video, but I'll put my sign
up link below in the description. If you click on my sign up link and sign up for starlink and start paying and create a starlink account, you and I both get a free month of Starlink. Starlink gives you kind of like an affiliate coupon. I don't get any money from them, but I will get at one free month on my starlink account, and so will you for using my link. Blow. So yeah, use starlink. I like Starlink. I continue to use it. I've had it for a year and a half or so at the time of
this recording. It's not a replacement for radio. It's just not. I challenge you. I challenge you to prove me wrong. It's not a replacement for radio because radio works everywhere all the time for free. Seventy three guys love to know what you think of the comment section. Blow See you next time.