118: Call Me Anywhere (Just Not Underwater)

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I'm your host, John Chi G, and today I'm once again joined by my good friend. Dick Hudson. How's it going? Pretty good, John. That was so perfect. It was. Oh thanks, man. Um bad props. Bad props. Oh, well cheers. Thank you so much. So um it's uh it's been a while. I checked. Um it has our last episode went up on the fifteenth of May in twenty twenty five. That means that it is nine months later.

Yeah, I know. Um and technically it's not Have we beat the bubble sort record? Uh that's hard to beat ex since it stopped. I mean, I know. Um but in terms of pragmatic somewhere Clay's shaking his fist at an iPhone right now. It's like as well he should potentially. He honestly should. He really should. I apologize.

To you, to Clay, to everyone. It's all my fault, people. And Mrs. B. Anyhow. Um Marvelous B obviously Mrs. B. Marvelous Mrs. B, yes. Um, our biggest fans. So off a bubble sort. Anyway, all right. Where are we at? Oh yes, right. So um the worst ever, longest ever prior gap was only eight and a half months. That was between hundred and episode one hundred nine and one hundred. So we've only just beaten it, but we've beaten it. So I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.

It's probably not so much, but uh a good thing. But anyhow, we're here now and that's what matters. So there you go. There you go. Uh so yeah, for patrons, um last year, late last year, the end of year special, I said I was considering wrapping up Pragmatic, but the reality is I actually really enjoy making it and I just wanna do uh episodes where we do have some topics that we do a little bit of a a deep dive on, but perhaps a shallower dive, but still.

Uh and and it's a chance for me to just sort of like get some of the tech stuff out of my head, I guess. If if you want really detailed analysis of stuff, there's always causality, uh if that's your kind of thing. But um in any case. So so if uh so you know, expect a few more episodes, hopefully fingers crossed uh over coming months. A sh subject to obviously to Vic's schedule uh and to mine,'cause it's a little bit It's gonna be a little bit crazy, innovative. Yeah.

A little bit. We'll make it work. We've talked about some good episodes I look forward to. Oh yeah. No we yeah, that's true. Um so for for the listeners, yeah, Vic and I before the show started were talking about different topic ideas and stuff like that. So yeah, we got some interesting stuff coming. So

Uh hopefully they'll be uh I don't know. Interesting to us anyway. Well yeah, we find interesting. But anyway. Okay. The jury's out on how how you feel. I guess you'll let us know. Anyway. The listeners may say Where's the Tylenol? They may say something. Oh dear. Anyhow. All right. So a couple of a couple of points. Uh I just wanted to add uh about the state of play with my other shows for those that are fans of the engineered network as a whole and don't just listen to pragmatic.

Uh if you have been listening to or have come across my other show called Whiskey Whiskey. Uh I've been making that now for about eighteen months and I've just made the decision to stop uh at this point. So I'm I'm taking a break um from making uh from making whiskey whiskey. Um most likely permanently.

uh and I'm just taking a step back from alcohol. I just feel like, you know, in terms of the net n net positive, net negative of alcohol, I think I've reached a point where um I just need to take a step back and assess my uh my position on that. So at this point That's all I have to say about it. Um I may talk more about it in future, but for the moment that's that.

Sometimes you have to, man. Yeah, oh totally. Right. Absolutely. And uh events events that have happened in my life have sort of prompted me to reconsider my position on it a as a whole. Uh not just as it relates to me, myself, of course, but also some other people that I know. it's something that um that yeah, have uh like I said, time to reassess.

Uh having said that, uh causality uh has reached another major milestone in the m in the intervening period between last episode and this episode. It's now been running for a whole ten years, a full decade of causality. So

I had some sort of celebrationists. I did a s I did a a special episode for patrons called uh um causality um what went wrong with causality. Um which was a bit of a Yeah, I know. So if you're if you ever Of course you did. Hey, man, you got to do it. That is awesome. And also just the ten years thing is awesome. Yeah. It's it's been it's Well we're wrong with causality. Well it's funny I thought'cause there's all these yeah, anyway, look, you know what?

I I'm not gonna spoil it. If people really, really wanna l listen then, you know, you I'm pretty sure I opened it up to anyone that was a paid patron. So I think you can even join it at like a dollar a month, have a listen to it and un undo it, unsub subscribe or unfollow if you want it. That's up to you. Do what you want. But it was uh it got a lot of really great feedback from the patrons and I'm glad I did it.

Uh it was a little bit tongue in cheek. That's cool. And I was also being a little bit critical of myself, of course, but then what else is new? Um I mean, if you're gonna really analyze the thing and break it down where it went wrong. Well, uh exactly. So It's a one-man show, it's kinda hard not to blame that man. Well, that's true. I I got nowhere to bloody hide, do I? Nowhere to hide.

So yeah, I mean I guess you could close your TARDIS coffin door and and lock yourself inside and hide, but I don't know that that's necessarily good for anybody. Uh yeah, no. So look I uh the world would miss you. I'm I'm pretty sure someone had missed me. But um in any case, uh yes, so moving on from that, not much else to say on the network side of things. Um I thought it might be a good idea to just quickly talk about um some hardware upgrades.

and not upgrades, you know, uh, on some of my equipment. Because it's surprising how little has changed, but but some things have. So I just want to say I'm still I yeah. I'm still rocking my ancient Mac Mini Intel. Uh it's still going. Uh running Catalina, doing good. Uh I still have my M one Max Studio. Nice. Uh it is running Tahoe, unfortunately, but it's running it.

Um li I'm not a fan of liquid glass and I'm not gonna do a whole episode on this, but I mean there are so many bugs in Tahoe that just grind my gears and I mean if if people are listening to like ATP, the talk show and all that, I know that they have mentioned from time to time and by that I mean

I think the the practical upshot is that there are so many paper cuts in Tahoe it's ridiculous. Like the most recent one I was dealing with for months was uh on twenty six point two when I went to close a browser tab.

in Safari and the little little X button would just disappear. Oh. So you couldn't actually close a tab. You have to change to a different tab. That always sounds fun. Yeah, you change to a different tab, change back, then the little little close button comes up again. It was so infuriating. They fixed it in twenty six point three, but

Oh my god. Anyway, never mind. All right. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna rant about it. I don't care. Um fine. Um my biggest complaints are I'm like I don't know if I necessarily even use my Apple devices enough to really notice a lot of the pain points anymore. But it it seems to me like visibility's really suffered with liquid glass. Yeah. Oh, it's shocking. It's so bad. As pretty as it is. I mean

The animations and stuff look beautiful. And some of the you know, the effects they're doing in it look absolutely beautiful. But being able to visibly see, you know, like the buttons and things you need to press or to Tell what the state of a button is is as really. Oh absolutely. And I I I do really think that their design language took precedence over functionality, and that is always a mistake. It has for many years. I know.

And I was really hoping it would improve when Johnny Ive left and at least on the hard hardware side of things we now have, oh, I don't know, an S D card reader in our laptops again. Haz huzza. We too we do have that, but whoever that guy is that I don't know if he still does. I'm assuming Marco still rails against whoever that guy is in charge of the software design nowadays. Yeah. Uh is it Alan Daw. He he really rails.

That's the one. Yeah. Marco used to really rail against him and I'm assuming he still does, but yeah. Like s it looks pretty, but functionality s is suffering due to some other pretty Yeah. Yeah, totally. Look I I looked at the um Yeah, I look first time I looked at liquid glass, I just thought, you know what, I want to upgrade some of the other features, but I've never enjoyed it at all. But look, I don't want to go on about it because I really don't care that much.

watch um any like about that f f at least not in the context of this episode, but and and I also feel like if you really want to listen to people whinge about it, there's plenty of other h podcasts out there where people do exactly that. So let's just move on. Definitely. Suffice it to say, um I still have my Mac Studio M one. She's still rocking and rolling and um yeah, uh representing, which is great.

Uh I still have my iPhone fifteen Pro Max ultra massive brick phone thing. Uh it's still going strong. I know, right? It's still going strong and uh I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. However I think I'm on the fourteen Pro Max. Uh you on the fourteen still. Okay, cool.

I think so, yeah. All right. Well it's still got a lightning port, I can tell you that. Oh okay. Yeah, no, mine was the mine's got the USB C, which is fantastic. I think I think mine was the last one with the lightning port. Yes. That yeah.

Really made me kick myself the next year when it came out with the USB C but it's fine. Yeah, totally. Yeah, exactly. I I'm super glad that it's gone uh over to USB C. Um we're down to one Honestly I'm all chi or mag safe these days anyway, so it really Yeah, I'm much the same, but when it comes to transferring uh like video files and photos, the USB C is a is a is a blessing for sure.

But anyway, all right, so the one thing that I do have that I did not have um last time we spoke is I have a new MacBook. So I used to have an M two MacBook Air, and now I have a M four MacBook Pro. And it is nice. It's gorgeous. I love this thing. And there was technically nothing wrong.

Uh so mine's the uh it's this the M four thirty two gig of RAM. Um I'm trying to remember if it's the m uh just uh just M four. Um but it ha I upgraded the hard drive. Display says? Oh sorry, it's a fourteen inch. Yeah. Fourteen. Okay. Yeah, I I can't deal with uh the bigger size. The it's just too big. So I love the sixteen Yeah, I know. You gotta soft spot for sixteen inch laptops. I understand that, that's fine. Uh but for me, it just I want the portability. Now this thing is

Thicker, heavier, and unlike the M two, it has fans. Uh the M two MacBook Air had had no fans. I used to love that. But the truth They're still pretty quiet fans. Oh yeah yeah. They're quiet, but they are still non zero sound. Like they still make sound. So Like when when this thing's cranking you will hear it. But uh in any case apart from that one thing and I just missed out on the M five MacBook uh Pro by three months. But the problem was that

The reason I got it is I started a new job. So this is another thing that I didn't actually put this in the notes, but I did start a new job. So I left uh the company I've been at for eleven and a half years and I went to work for an electrical contractor and uh to to lead up a automation team. Uh at least that was the that was the pitch anyhow.

Um, it's been a bit of a slow burn, if I'm honest. But the the reality was that I needed to fire up virtual machines. And the problem is that some of these virtual machines running the um the just not just AutoCAD. They're pretty resource heavy. Yeah, it's the memory is what killed me. So the the M two MacBook Air did not have enough memory. Um so

I decided to just bite the bullet. I sold the M two, got a decent amount for it because it wasn't that old. It was only about not even two years old at that point when I sold it. And then I got this one. So Uh and I'm and I'm glad I got it. Uh it's a beautiful laptop. It's quite possibly the best laptop I've ever had. I just wish it was a little bit thinner and lighter and had no fans, but oh well, never mind. Yeah. Right.

Well you no. No, I suppose not. It's very philosophical. But I guarantee you it's a beautiful machine and it runs great. Yes. Well I got silver uh because I just did, uh because I couldn't get any other decent colour that I liked. Well look, no judgment. Like it's it's like apparently I'm a very boring nerd. Man, uh it's whatever works for you. And you like the look of it, you like the look of it, and that's totally okay.

Um but on terms of uh watches, last time we spoke I'm like, you know, I'm really enjoying not wearing a smartwatch. Well I decided probably about six, seven months ago that I actually all right.

But here's the truth, right? Truth is, uh I had gotten so used to leaving my phone on silent and having my phone ring and tap me on my watch. Like you know me, my Apple Watch would tap me when my phone was ringing, right? I got so used to doing that. When I went down dumb what I just didn't remember to put my phone on like Loud, like not silent, like take it off silent. I I forgot kept forgetting. Right. And my wife would leave me a message and say, Pick up the damn phone, please.

I mean, you know, like various and then you're in trouble. Yeah, very then you're in trouble. Various levels of int You never want that message. No, you don't. You really don't. So listener at home, this is something we avoid. So we avoid this. And I also thought to myself This is a pragmatic application of tech in our lives, people take note. No kidding. So whatever you have to buy or get

To prevent that message, you do it because you never want it. Mm-hmm. Hundred percent. And I and that's what I end up doing. I'll just like, you know, I'll bugger it. I'm gonna get. Uh so I got a Series ten, I got four six millimeter, just the GPS model, and I decided to do something totally different. Cause you know I have this fixation with stainless steel. Um I just decided, you know what, no. Um I'm gonna go with uh black aluminium, just just cause I can.

So No ultra No ultra. No my ultra days are over. I'm surprised. It's it's d okay. They're too freaking big. They're just I can't sleep with them on. I love it. I love it. That's cool. And I also love the fact that I've still got The first gen Ultra. What are we up to now? I know I'm at least one version behind, if not two. I think it's just the third gen. I can't remember. I haven't been keeping up. So I love the fact that I've got the first gen Ultra and it still has no

Damn, that's pretty good. Never been able to say that about an aluminum model, ever. No. No, that's true. So I um yeah, so honestly, I mean it's If I were to describe it, I would say it is fit for purpose. Uh it does not make me smile, giggle, jump out of my skin and say, Oh, I'm so glad I got this watch sort of thing. It's just like it's it serves a purpose and it was not expensive, which was the main thing.

So you know, I could have got the smaller size and been cheaper again, but then none of my watch bands would've fit. So'cause I've still got all my watch bands from the last ten years. Well of course. As you do. I know, right? Oh dear. And so finally, I just wanted to make sure that you knew personally, Vic, and for the listeners that heard me gushing about the Apple Vision Pro a few episodes ago, which is actually quite a while ago now.

Have I bought an Apple Vision Pro? No, I have not. And I know that there are people out there that are gonna say, But just You know, if you had asked me back when we recorded that episode And I think you did. Yeah. I thought it was only a matter of time. I know. You made that point. You said, Yeah, you're gonna get one in the next few months. Just admit it. Yeah. Something like that you said, I think. And I'm like, Yeah, probably.

But no, I did not. And uh and for the record It's just such a gratuitous piece of technology right now. I think yeah. It's the sort of tech that y if you've got a lot of disposable income and you are just like, I wanna have the coolest, latest toy That thing is incredible. It is still And that's that's exactly what you're getting too. I think you said the magic word there, toy. Yeah. I mean

There's no beating around the bush, it's amazing technology. There's no beating around the bush that there's high price tech inside it to justify some of that price point, but not all. Yeah. And but it ultimately at the end of the day, it's still an entertainment device and a toy. Yeah. No, totally. And um the the I read a couple of blog posts just recently'cause

I had another thought occur to me, I'm like, ooh, I could buy one of these second hand now, they've been out for so long. So I had a look on Facebook Marketplace, which also makes me feel dirty when I do look at Facebook anything, but still.

Well, I'd have to be dirty with you'cause like I've I've sold some woodwork on Facebook Marketplace. That's a different story for a different episode. Yeah, put a pin in that. We might talk about that later, but I mean another time. But yeah, honestly, yeah, you're not wrong. It it feels a bit wrong, but in any case uh they they are half the price. But

I still can't justify half the price. It's still too expensive. It's still expensive, man. Ridiculous amount of money. And So what did that make it? Sixteen hundred? Uh yeah, which in Australian dollars is about three grand because, you know It's like that's still a lot of money. So full retail Australian is six grand. Correct. Yeah.

Oh yeah. No. No. Yeah. No. No, that's this is why John has not bought an Apple Vision Pro. I just cannot stomach that amount of money. It is insanely over the top. Unbelievably insanely over the top. So

Oh well, that's fine. Um about the only thing I can think I'd use it for would be, you know, like watching three D content that I've either created or three D movies or something, which I haven't actually created much three D content or spatial content and I don't have too many movies in three D that I would just love to watch.

And the other thing is that what's my wife gonna do? Like if I'm sitting there watching I don't know That's the thing. What why would I watch Avatar? But I mean, hey, Avatar in three D and say, wow, it looks good. And I'll be like to my wife, Hey, this looks really good. And she's like, Well I don't know. I wanted to have what I know. Okay, okay. So it's it's I It's such a solo experience, man. Mm-hmm.

Oh anyway. But so there you go. Sorry to disappoint people if I am in fact disappointing you. And if I am, too bad. I just can't justify it. Sorry. But anyway, that's it. No other tech really to do to uh to discuss or report or anything. Mind you, I think I still think that's plenty, if I'm honest. But uh but yeah.

Um anything from your side or have you still got much of the same stuff as the last one? No, just a lot of the jobby job interspersed with a a few brief moments of good cooking and woodwork.

More cooking recently than the woodwork. I honestly haven't had a lot of time for woodwork since like the fall. Yeah, okay. But I have been fun like doing some some cooking. Nothing really fancy or extravagant, but I've decided

Once again to try and tackle my weight issues and so I'm doing the the low carb thing and I've been making me a lot of burritos with these uh I don't know if you guys have in Australia. There's a company called Mission. Oh yes. And they make a uh It's called a Carb Smart or Smart Balance or It's a low carb tortilla. To say not really a low carb tortilla, but it's a uh a tortilla where the carbohydrates are offset by a metric ton of fiber. Well, fair enough. Got offset it with something.

So like if you believe in the uh whole net carbs thing, like it's twenty one grams of carbs and then by the time you subtract all the fiber from it it's thir three grams of carbs. Right. Okay. And I've been making like bean burritos and beaten and beef burritos and breakfast burritos and Just lots of fun stuff like that. Nothing to really brag about or anything, but I've been having fun cooking them and I've definitely enjoyed eating them. Fantastic. That's cool, man. All the burritos.

Mm-hmm. Excellent. Yeah. One of my sons went through a phase where he ate nothing but burritos. And my w um and my m my wife was like, Um, you are aware that burritos are not a food group and there's more variety out there and my son Ben said uh Yeah, but they're so damn good, so I don't need anything else. Anyway. Um moving on. Okay. For me it's just an attempt to like

stay away from some other alternatives that would be a little heavier on my waist, so to speak, you know? No, that's definitely the way to go. And honestly it's uh It's um It's also a more economical way than something like Wigovy or Monjaro or Zempik, because that's shit that's really expensive. I actually even tried uh I don't know if we ever talked about it on any podcasts or not. About a year ago I tried the carnivore diet. That's like Atkins, is it?

Soda thing? Um it's it's like an Atkins or a keto diet on steroids. So you basically want only things that come from clay, cover your ears if you're listening, animal. Uh um lots and lots of beef, pork Uh basically meat. Right. Meat, butter, that kind of things. Okay. No vegetables, no plants, no if it didn't come from an animal, you're not eating it.

But it's basically extreme keto is what it boils down to. Yeah. And I actually did lose a little bit of weight with it, but I think I still got carried away with portion sizes. So I didn't lose as much weight as I should have. And you mentioned expense a few moments ago. That's uh that's actually an expense.

I mean y y you start trying to eat steak and eggs five, six nights a week. Yeah, that's not that's ex yeah, that that adds up. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if like your passion is like rib eyes and New York strip.

Yeah, for sure. Actually, you know, the funny thing with meat, meat's gotten so expensive. Um I'm not sure what it's like in the States, but here in Australia it's gotten really, really expensive and we actually now have, you know, like r cuts of meat in the Woolworths coals, you know, the local, you know Uh, food store, I guess. And um they've now got security tags on them. So On the meat? Yeah.

Like the actual packaging. Yeah, I know. It's because it's it's gotten so expensive that people have started like stealing it'cause it's just they can't they can't afford it and they still want it and oh well. That's hardcore. Oh boy. Yeah, that is.'Cause the first time I saw it I'm like, You're you're kidding me. Really? Right. Um don't see you putting those tags on the bread.

Anyway, all right. So uh nobody ever wants to steal the bread. Yeah, I know, right? It's that back in the day stealing a loaf of bread got you um deported from the UK out to Australia, so and you convict you It's fun actually locally they've been cracking down on uh on illegal um tobacco sales because they've put the Australian government put so much tax on tobacco, it's now cheaper, much, much cheaper to do illegal importing. And selling it under the counter. So there's all these

shops that have popped up selling like cheap cigarettes and stuff. And they just went on a big, big uh series of uh bust operations. I think that in in Southeast Queensland they busted like two hundred stores uh selling illegal tobacco. That makes sense. That makes sense. Like even here, you know, they've they they're smart enough nowadays that that's all behind the counter, but Get yeah, there's no part of getting old that's enjoyable, I think is a fair way to s fair way to put it.

Uh but anyhow. Um all right. So I think it would be a good time to get stuck into the main topic for the episodes. Um if you're okay, if there's anything else you wanted to quickly throw in before we do. I don't know, man. We're only twenty seven. I think we got at least another ten or fifteen. Oh yeah, wants some more banter? Okay. No, I'm glad. Just bland.

Let's move on. Okay. So the main topic I've actually been researching for quite a while, and frankly, I was hoping more would have happened in this space since I first cracked the lid on this one. And that is It's kind of slowing down, isn't it? Yeah, it is. And this is, um so the listeners know what we're talking about. It's in yeah if it's not obvious from the title of the episode, it may not be

I want to talk about just briefly SpaceX and specifically their satellite service for direct to cell phone or DTC uh technology. So the idea is, and this is the this is the pitch, right? You and I, everyone out there has a whole bunch of smartphones and these smartphones operate on standard terrestrial bands, so like three G, four G, five G LTE, all the LTs all the Gs, everything.

And i right now, if you want to talk to a satellite, your only real options are that weird service that uh that the newer iPhones support that are ha on Apple, like which is a very, very, very low bandwidth, very slow, very

Not great. Uh which is not to say that it's n this it's not useless. It's really honestly just me for microbus transmission too. Yes, it is. And it's like and I've tried it and it's obviously I was not in an emergency, but I I got the the signal up and I did the whole wavy thing in the air, I'm like, Oh cool. But I mean Oh, you did the testing? I tried, but it didn't actually transmit and I'm kinda glad it didn't because it's not like I was in an emergency. I was just kicking the tires on it. So

It sorta probably does work, but it's not exactly like you can just send a text message, yo, Vic, how you doing? Is not gonna work via that service. So um in any case Uh then you've got Iridium or um GlobalSat or these all these other different brands of low Earth orbit uh satellites, and you need a special handset to talk to them that's got a much bigger antenna, more power. Worse battery life and less smartphoney. The point is that

SpaceX is saying, well, those are the things that we see in movies when people say they've got like a satellite phone, right? Exactly. And when I was working at my the last company I was working at, when we'cause we had a lot of remote sites Uh so we would give our people not just land based um uh ve uh uh what is it called? Sorry, uh Tetra radios, which are land based, we'd also give them satellite phones for when there was no uh Tetra coverage.

So you know, it's but but it's a specialised handset, right? And they're specialised satellites and so on and so forth. So So what um what Muskie Deer and all the friends at SpaceX said is that we're gonna do a bunch of satellites in our Starlink um constellation.

uh that'll be able to talk directly to existing cell phones. No modifications required, no special hardware, no nothing. It'll just work. And when they originally said this, I kinda like rolled my eyes. I'm like, well that's not gonna work because and insert all these reasons here. But as I thought about it some more, I realized that it's actually something because of the nature of Starlink, they might just be able to pull it off.

So that's why I wanted to have a look at this. And I first started researching this over a year ago, but it just kinda like hit the back burner because there wasn't enough Like they hadn't actually sh demonstrated it working. And since then they've done multiple demos and it's now been rolled out in a couple of countries in a very limited way. So I thought time is right, let's just talk about it. So

Uh I did speak about Starlink with uh Radek uh Pietroshevsky back on episode ninety nine. That was back in August of twenty twenty. So I'm not gonna go over the whole Starlink thing, I'll refer you back to that episode. He's a great guy and that was a great episode, people.

Find the link in the show notes. Go back and listen to it. Cool. Yeah, thanks, Vic. It was a good episode and and Raddock is uh so cool. I liked it and and his name is awesome as well, too, for the record. Mm-hmm. Um but never mind. Uh so yeah, uh have a listen. Fun fact, I stumbled across him randomly on the internet one day. It was like one of the few times I ever felt like a celebrity and he was like, Is this Vic from Pragmatics?

And I was like, Why yes it is. Yes, um fellow co hosts fellow co hosts of Pragmatic Unite. Well I think um I wouldn't swear to it, but I think this was even before he had done the Oh, okay. Oh fair enough. Like I think he was a legit, genuine listener back then. Mm-hmm. Oh yeah, he was. And the we started interacting and the reason that I got him on the show is I found out how much he was into

uh satellites and rockets and so on and so forth. So talking to him about Starlink was uh and SpaceX was a um was a natural fit and he brought a lot to the show. It was fantastic. It was a good episode. It was. Um but in any case. Alright, so uh F as I've say from time to time, I worked at Nortel back in the day and I and I just know how hard it is to get four G, LTE, and most recently five G.

uh to work from a terrestrial level point of view where they've you've got fixed towers. Like the towers aren't moving. They're just sitting there. Um and you're that whole line of sight thing really screws us over. Uh yeah it does. Uh the range is generally limited to about forty five miles or seventy two Ks or thereabouts, and that's because of the curvature of the Earth.

Um obstacles, not just houses but trees. Yeah. All of those all of the things, all the obstructions, obstacles, whatever you want to call it, and and you you're stuck with line of sight.

That's both a good thing and a bad thing. But when you've got something like satellite, the only obstacle you've got between the satellite and you is what's above your head. And and pretty much the only thing that can change in that regard, um is the weather. So if you've got really, really heavy, heavy rain you will get a lot of lost signal because it just scatters in the uh in the rain. Uh

You know, a satellite's only useful as long as you're not underwater. Uh'cause if you're underwater that's not gonna help. And if you're in a And if you're inside a building. It's strange, isn't it? It's like you can call me anywhere as long as it's not underwater though. Um and uh but in any case, whatever. The point th yeah. It's not just that, it's obviously buildings, it's tunnels, it's mine sites. So the next time you're down in the s in the deepest mine in the world

mining for diamonds or whatever the heck or gold or I think it's diamonds, whatever. There's a mine in South America. As you do. I mean like where else do you expect to find a spray gold? Yeah, I know. Yes. I haven't tripped over a bar of gold in a while, I have to admit. I need to trip over another one. I haven't tripped over a bar of gold ever. Well it was it was a lot of fun. I unfortunately had to give the bar of gold back'cause it wasn't mine, but anyway.

Okay, back on topics. Yeah, that always blows. Yes. So uh the the key with satellite communications and or any communication anyhow it really is to maintain a solid uh link margin. And it gets very difficult to do that. Uh especially when you've got a little transmitter that can't really transmit very much um in your smartphone all the way up to a satellite, which is a long, long way away, even if there's no obstructions between you and it.

So I thought I might do a little bit of a dig into and compare Starlink and Iridium slightly and Beyond signal strength, which we'll get to in a minute, let's just talk about uh like lag, uh or rather Latency. So first of all, for Iridium's satellites. So Iridium satellites, they're about four hundred and eighty five miles or seven hundred and eighty kilometers uh above the surface of the Earth. Mm-hmm.

And they have a latency of around about four hundred milliseconds, plus or minus a hundred milliseconds. So if you look at it roughly, it works out to point two five milliseconds per kilometer. But that's only useful when we talk about starling for comparison. But the reason that there's um a decent amount of lag in there is that iridium's different because The handoffs are made between multiple satellites to get back to ground stations.

Well that's no different to Starlink. But the difference is there's only five ground stations in the whole world. So Iridium chose a model where they had less ground stations and ground infrastructure, which means that any phone call or any data connection has to be routed around the satellites to the nearest uh ground station to get routed down to Earth again. Uh and of course vice versa. So because of that it's a little bit of a trade off that those ground stations.

Exactly. So you can't do anything clever like that. Like you can't go So if I'm if I've got two people on Iridium satellites, both of them in, you know, let's say the middle of nowhere in Kentucky or something and there's no coverage and they want to call each other, they've got to go all the way up both of them have to go all the way up to a nearest satellite.

And have to go down to the nearest ground station and back in order to communicate with each other. It's okay. We're used to climbing up to the top of the hill to c holler at the house next door anyway. Oh dear. Very good. So let's talk about Starlink now by comparison. So Starlink is a fair bit closer. They're only 342 miles or 550 kilometers.

um orbit. Mm-hmm. Now that means that but their measured latency is vastly different. They only get sixty milliseconds of latency. Which depending upon your point of view, if you're playing fur um, you know, fur uh First person shooter games, network games, you would say that's terrible or probably not that great. But the reality is that it's a heck of a lot better than Iridium. But why is that? Because It should be two hundred and seventy five milliseconds if it was

engineered the same way as iridium, but it's not because uh with Starlink, there's a heck of a lot d less delay because the handoffs can handoff to over a hundred and seventy ground stations around the world. Mm-hmm. So because of this The traffic is far more localized, which therefore reduces the lag. And as soon as you get back down to Earth again, you're on fiber optics and, you know, it's about as fast as you're gonna get, even though the speed of light is really slow, but whatever.

So the speed of light is really slow. Oh, totally is, man. Yeah. Absolutely. Sure. Okay. Yeah. Well it's sl everything's relative. Anyway. So Starlink has four I'll give you that one. Yes.

Um actually no, they've got more than that. Hang on. No, there's four thousand four hundred satellites, they're being lowered. They're going to a lower Earth orbit. Uh so this year apparently they're doing a whole bunch of satellite lowering. It's gonna drop'em down to two hundred ninety eight miles or four hundred and eighty K. Obviously that's going to improve your latency. Probably by about maybe ten percent better, maybe a little bit more.

Certainly not gonna hurt. Mm-hmm. But that's not why they're doing it. Apparently they're doing it because there was a near collision uh with a Chinese satellite that was in a similar low Earth orbit. Um because China's building their own low Earth orbit constellation. Because obviously, why wouldn't you? Sorry.

All these low Earth orbits are gonna start getting littered with a bazillion satellites. And I tell you what, if you're an astronomer, oh man, you're gonna be pretty dirty about that There's so much junk floating around up there. So much. Any long exposure is guaranteed to have satellite trails on it at this point. It doesn't matter what part point of the sky you're looking at. It's just it's not great A. But anyhow

Uh yeah, so there are to in total nine thousand four hundred operational satellites in Starlink. Now I don't I didn't do the math exactly. It should be about another about four three and a half thousand, something like that. They are actual I don't know the exact figure, but they orbit slightly uh at a different um altitude. So three hundred and fifty Ks, two hundred seventeen miles. Mm-hmm. Anyway.

So I want to talk about um the solar cycle just for a minute. So anyone that's into amateur radio or radio like C B radio everything, um would would knows about the ionosphere. And I've talked about it in the past, I forget which episode, but it doesn't matter, I did in the past. So it's ele roughly eleven years long, so they talk about it as a solar cycle, so maxima and minima. So the maxima brings more charged particles into our ionosphere and then that charges up the ionosphere, which affects

uh our skip or what's referred to as tropospheric uh propagation. So that allows you to skip a signal all around the world and so on and so forth. But if you're a satellite operator, the maxima will actually increase your atmospheric drag. So the satellites during maxima will actually slow down.

Uh more so than at a minima. What I mean by this is it it doesn't actually affect the signal exactly because at high frequencies that we're punching through, generally speaking, um, it will not care about propagation. Okay. So there's more drag, believe it or not. Okay.'Cause the reason though I thought it's dangerous is because well not dangerous, but I you put something in low Earth orbit, it's the orbit will deteriorate with time to a point at which

it will eventually get captured by the pe earth's gravitational field and it's just gonna come down. One day it's gonna be a shooting star for somebody. It'll become a nice shooting star, which, you know, depending upon your point of view is a good thing. But I don't know. The point is that um they were waiting until after the solar maxima passed before they dropped the orbit.

And the thing that I don't get is it costs so much money to put these things up and th then once they're up, they're just gonna fall back down again. So there's this weird trade off between We'll just keep launching more and then the old ones will just fall back to Earth and we'll just keep launching more. And I'm like, Okay. I realized that if humanity were to stop launching crap into space, eventually most of it would drop down. Hey I actually you remember that um the movie um WALL-E?

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And you remember that as the as the ship's leaving the a atmosphere, that's like all these satellites are just going out of the way. And it's like, oh my God, that is what it's just feels like that's what it's gonna be like. Uhhuh. Anyway. All right. So let's talk about um approvals. So the FCC approved up to fifteen thousand satellites to be launched for SpaceX, covering the Mobile Satellite Service or MSS. uh and the fixed satellite service or FSS vans. So

I gotta mention the bands for completeness. So you got the KU band, which is twelve to eighteen gigs. You got the KA band, which is twenty six point five to forty gigs. You've got the V band, which is forty to seventy five gigs. You can see the frequency is going up quite a bit now. Mm-hmm. There's an overlap with the E band.

sixty to ninety gigs and W band is seventy five to one hundred and ten gigs. And you may think, oh well these bands they're overlapping slightly. It's like yeah but those two seem pretty close. They are. Well there are some overlap, right? And the reason is because the band is not just the band. The band is also the channels within the band. So

I don't want to go into all of the nitty-gritty detail, but broadly speaking, they've just split up the bands for whatever reason historically like that. So they've given them license to work on that. But that's not LTE frequencies. All those are your interlink frequencies to and from ground stations because you need that bandwidth for the all the aggregated data coming from the satellites to and from the ground stations. Because if you don't have that bandwidth,

you you can't take the satellite signals back down to the earth again and back up again. Just y y you need that bandwidth, so Right. Anyway, all right. Now direct to cell satellites, they also have eight hundred megahertz to two gigahertz. That's to communicate with you know our smartphones, LTE mobiles on the ground. So we talked about frequencies, we talked about quantities of satellites and so on and so forth, but what we have not talked about is

The other problem, um, is power. Mm-hmm. So how is this possible?'Cause like an iridium phone has a dedicated antenna and it's got much higher gain and it's got more transmit power as well. So four G, let's just take four G. And we go with our worst case scenario, top end of the spectrum, two gigahertz. Mm-hmm. Okay, that's worst case for penetration through atmospherics, buildings, and so on and so forth.

Now, in terms of sig receive signal level, you're targeting anything better than about ninety negative ninety DBM. Uh that's received power at the iPhone receiver. Right. Uh but it's it's actually still usable down to about a minus a hundred DBM, much below that and you're in the you're in the weeds, you're in the noise.

So if you just look at path loss in free space, so this is no atmospheric losses whatsoever, at four hundred and eighty kilometers, assuming an isotropic radiator, which I've explained in the past, whatever. At two gigahertz, you're gonna lose 150 dB. So that means your poor little iPhone antenna

is realistically gonna get you nothing. Squat. Right. It's it's really it's pushing the only thing that it can push, which is power in a Starlink satellite. It's the only way you're gonna make it work. So you've got to have a much more powerful uh transmission to get down to the phone. Mm-hmm. So there's two ways you can get gain. You can focus your RF energy. You can either use things like phased arrays or parabolic dishes and that sort of thing.

And of course the old fashioned one, just put more transmit power into it. But the problem is you have a satellite and that satellite's spinning around the world and it's only got uh solar power and batteries to keep it going. So So what I did,'cause I couldn't help it, is Well, don't you still have the power the problem of the power of the phone to reach back up to it? Oh you do, yes. Okay. You do. Yes. You have the reciprocal problem as well.

So dealing with the the the downlink problem at the moment though, this is how they've addressed it. So I found some design documents uh that talk about the gain of a Starlink antenna being thirty eight DBI, which is or thirty eight DB over isotropic. Mm-hmm. So The that combined with the power, they say gives it a total of fifty eight DBW. So that's fifty eight D B what

But the problem with db watts is that db watts is not like decibel is nonlinear, right? So you can't just add and subtract it. It's logarithmic, yeah. It's logarithm. Exactly, right. So because of that. You back calculate it and it works out between the antenna and the power output. It therefore must be outputting a peak of about 100 watts. Which yeah, I could kind of believe that, I think. And that gets you about minus eighty three DBM at the iPhone on the ground.

Well it is, but it's still it it's so you're about seventeen D B above your absolute cutoff and you're about seven D B above your ideal. Which then'cause you could lose twenty D B in atmospheric loss if you've got a really bad rainstorm go past. Like really, really bad. So it would drop out still probably during a really bad rainstorm. But then again, if you're standing out in the middle of a rainstorm making a phone call, it's probably not a good idea anyway. But never mind.

Yes, you do. Anyway, never mind. Um, I really want to make this phone call via my Starlink thing. Uh you're gonna get struck by lightning. Yeah, I don't care, but I gotta make this phone call and that was the last thing we ever heard from him. Anyway to order a pizza here, man. Yeah, man. Pizza delivery to the middle of this field in Kentucky. There you go. Oh my god. Anyhow. So uh that's so hundred watts.

To me, like for a ground station, that's like that's par for the course. If I'm transmitting hundred watts at on HF frequencies, that's nothing. But fifty for 100 watts at higher frequencies is a little bit more difficult. Not impossible, but it's just, you know, it's a fair bit of grunt for two gigahertz.

But it's quite doable. I mean these satellites are tiny, right? They're quite quite large. I didn't get their dimensions, unfortunately, because I I figured, you know, like enough's enough at some point. But in any case, well I mean you dig too deep in that somebody's gonna come nice. Uh yeah, mm. They have to find me first. But anyway. Okay. Lovely. So um okay. So Starlink have another face up their sleeve because unlike Iridium, they have got a hell of a lot more satellites.

A order of magnitude more, and then some. So m as you are talking to w on like one satellite, it's already probably getting too far away from you. You'll just switch to the next one along. Mm-hmm. And so what that means you can do is you can have a really narrow focus of your antenna.

Uh and of course that has another uh practical problem is that the narrower you focus the antenna, the less ground area you're gonna cover. But that's okay because you've got more satellites, you just switch to the next one and the next one, the next one. So

It will fall off. Yeah, but every time you hop satellites like that, that's a chance for it to fail. That's true. But if you're dealing with data as opposed to a traditional phone call, then that's actually not quite so bad. So like you might lose a couple of packets of data as you switch between satellites, but With VoIP and VoIP technology, the way that it's developed over the last twenty years, that's actually not too bad.

So I I actually Okay. Yeah. So if I was doing like traditional cellular like before spread spectrum, before like if I was doing channelized analog frequencies, this would be impossible. Like you just wouldn't even bother trying. And they didn't. So I think that there's enough that you can compensate and most people won't even notice. But there is one other thing that I find fascinating uh and that's Doppler. So the problem with Doppler is that

uh as the satellite is approaching you, the frequency will shift higher on approach and then it'll shift lower as it departs. And that's gonna be compensated for on the iPhone as well. And there's a limit to what it can handle. But that's more of a problem with narrow bands rather than spread spectrum. Which again, like I said, it's pretty much all we use now on smartphones is all spread spectrum technology. So your carrier may shift.

Up and down, but if you lose a bit on the fringes, you'll just get a higher data error rate. You'll still be able to talk. It's just that it won't be as high a bandwidth. Like you'll lose data and therefore your net data transmission rate will drop. So but it's not the end of the world. It'll still mostly work. So So the satellite's challenges are you need to have a set of batteries and they can only get charged when the orbital section is exposed to the sun.

Now at four hundred eighty Ks, that's a ninety four minute Earth orbit. You hear people talk about ninety minute Earth orbits, it's like, you know, ninety four minutes close enough. Um but there still has to be enough power in that to make phone calls and then to replenish itself, um, which means you're gonna need a lot of solar panels and decent storage on it. But it's constantly gonna be charging up, draining, charging up, draining.

Endlessly. So that is the first design. Oh, it's rough on the whole bloody thing, mate. It's like the whole like this is it The only reason that they could even really do this is the fact that if you make the the cost to launch so cheap and the cost to manufacture these things so cheap, you can afford to do this. Otherwise you end up with a system like Iridium, which works, it's just you need a special handset. Anyway. Right.

Uh one of the other little funky tricks that these uh the Starlink do, which is not unique, by the way, to the direct to cell versions that they put up, which are a different Starlink satellite. They've got more of the they've got these antennas and transmitters on them. uh is they can they're using laser for inter satellite communication optically. So that

Is very, very cool. Um it reduces your conversion losses from electrical to optical and back again, which is cool. And you can actually get away with that in space'cause there's no fiber optic needed. Right. I didn't mean It's it's pretty cool.'Cause I mean fiber optic is like a clean laser, some lenses and mirrors. Yeah, essentially. And it's kinda cool. So

All right. Um so that's about that's most of the techy tech stuff I guess I wanted to talk about. But so by the end of twenty twenty four, they were offering text messages only. And that was for, you know, like end users or whatever else. There was a video called demoed in March of twenty twenty four, but that was just a demo.

Now, originally, if I remember correctly, it was T Mobile that they first did it in the States to t as their demo, but it took forever, well not forever, like a year or something before it became more generally available. So Uh there was even a WhatsApp call quite recently in December of twenty twenty five from Kazakhstan of all places.

Uh and they had a data connection of four megabits per second, which frankly is not too shabby. That's on a standard you know that's actually kind of impressive. It's very impressive. So I think what it demonstrates is that They proved it could be done, but they had to wait until a cluster of satellites was overhead at the right time in order to actually pull off the demo.

Then they had to launch a heck of a lot more of them. Like a lot more of them. Mm-hmm. And then they had to gradually open this up to more and more customers. And then they still had to launch more.

So it's gonna be one of those things, like the more people use it, the more satellites are gonna need the same old thing, which is why they've applied for up to fifteen thousand. In fact, I think they've applied for more than that, which is a ridiculous, insane number of satellites. But that's what they want. Yeah. They've done the math and I'm like, All right. That's a lot of satellites, but

On the negative side, uh there's apparently been some complaints from astronomers. I sort of alluded to this before, but the DTC satellites, because they have uh based on my understanding, they must have larger antennas for lower frequencies. But not just that, they must have, because of the power requirements, probably got more in the way of solar panels to replenish that charge. Therefore they are more reflective.

So the sun it's more obvious. It obscures their view of actual space and space things. So like if you have a normal Starlink satellite and then a D T C satellite go one past the other and you're looking at it, you'll get a massive star trial. Oh sorry, satellite trial, not star trial.

a satellite trail um caused by the DTC one, whereas the traditional Starlink satellites were far less visible at on at Earth. They were engineered specifically to not reflect the sunlight, so they wouldn't annoy astronomers. But now with DT C they're like, yeah, whatever. So I think the astronomers continue to be a little bit shitty about that, and I can't say I blame him, but anyway.

So this is very cool tech, right? But I don't know i don't know if it's a net win or not, but uh anyway, they're gonna keep launching them. It's very cool. So In terms of where you can get it right now today, at time of recording, and we're recording this in February of twenty twenty six, so Uh in Australia, currently we only support messaging, so just text messaging only. And when I tried it myself, so my work phone is on Telstra, my personal line is on a Telstra wholesaler.

But I never once saw Telstra SpaceX come up when I was way out west where the rain don't fall over Christmas. Mm-hmm. Um so but there is no extra cost per month according to the Telstra website. It should just work. And in my case it did not work, but that's okay. For all I know, they hadn't turned it on.

Right. Oh well. Uh now obviously I mentioned T Mobile before there of it's available in the United States of course for an extra ten dollars a month, US. Mm-hmm. And uh in Canada of course you got Rogers. Uh so Rogers in Canada have got that. Depending on the plan, it's an extra fifteen dollars Canadian a month. So similar kind of price range when you're factoring. But there there's also actually a bunch of others around the world that have got it, but if I'm honest, really not many.

I guess the reason that Considering the expense that's involved in making that work, that seems like a pretty reasonable consumer. Yeah, absolutely. Look, honestly, man, I I think that it's fantastic. I think the technology is amazing, but my problem is simple and that is well, you know, is it Is it really worth what it's costing to make this work? Because I don't know. I I guess there's this whole thing of is it a solved problem? And the short answer is I guess it was

a solved problem provided you bought a handset. It's very appealing for anyone who has a s no special handset, but you find yourself on a road, there's no cell service, well suddenly you've got it. It almost feels like a

How do I put this? It's like a a minimum service, like an emergency service almost. Is what it feels more like to me at the moment. Rather than it's it's oh, I'm gonna go out to the middle of nowhere and stream a video. It's one of those things it's kinda like insurance, you know, like Mm. Most of the time you don't need it and it might feel like you're wasting your money, but that time you really need it, you're glad you got it. Yeah.

So I think Starlink's sorry, SpaceX's strategy is to once the um starship is actually working without blowing up and is able to land without blowing up or falling over or whatever. I mean they're making progress and it's going along really well well for them, I guess. They're happy with it. Um but once that has reached the point where they can safely put payloads in it and they can deliver a ridiculous number of these satellites into low Earth orbit in one go, then suddenly this will accelerate.

But for now it's still, you know, a few dozen at a time, few dozen at a time. It just takes time. And The satellites are only going to be good for about, I don't know, ten, fifteen years and they're going to come down again. So they're going to have to keep putting new ones up, which is both good and bad. Right. It means you can put newer tech in them as they go up and you then get this The advantage of having

Not having satellites in in orbit It's still an expense and a cost though. Oh totally. And it just it kinda makes me wonder about their business model too, right? Because I mean if they're only charging ten dollars a month for that and in from T Mobile in the state.

I mean how is it Telstra aren't charging anything for it? It's kind of weird. I don't know. Feels strange. This I would expect it's heavily subsidized by government. Yeah, maybe agencies utilizing it? I don't know. Maybe. It seems strange to me. So actually if you do know white It seems like something that like the CIA and the Feds and the Mossad and Yeah. You know, all of those type agencies would be all over. Yeah. Well all all I can s all I can say, Vic, is that um

If well okay, if if if you guys if anyone listening knows, I'd be very curious. Just uh like shoot me a message, I'd be very curious uh to understand how their business model works. But I to me it's just it's very interesting. But the tech itself is fascinating. Uh in terms of the iPhone transmit power, which I I realise I kind of glossed over.

Uh the reality is you can overcome some of that if you've got a high highly directional antenna. So you can actually, you know, listen in to that. Mm-hmm. But the interesting challenges come when you've got lots and lots of mobiles trying to talk to the one satellite. at the same time and uh they're in different positions and hence they've got different Dopplers relative to the satellite is fascinating. But uh in any case

Uh I didn't I didn't have too much else to add if I'm honest about it. I just find the technology fascinating and I look forward to being able to try it and it works. It is. For me. Yeah, it is fascinating. All right. Anything else you wanna add? Or shall we wrap it up? Mm mm.

I I think we could probably wrap it up pretty good. You covered it pretty good. Cool. All right. Well if you want to talk more about this, you can reach me uh on the Fediverse at qg at engineered.space or the network at engnet at engineer dot space.

Uh if you are enjoying Pragmatic and you'd like to support us and keep the show ad free, you can by becoming a premium supporter. Uh visit engineer dot network slash pragmatic to learn how you can help the show to continue to be made. Thank you.

A big thank you to all of our supporters and a special thank you to our silver producers Mitch Bielger, Shane O'Neal, Jared Roman, Katarina Will, Chad During, Ian Gallagher, and Jamie Russell. With an extra special thank you to our amazing gold producers, Stephen Bridal. Now if you'd like to get in touch with Vic, uh what's the best way for them to get in touch with you, mate? Uh And reply to you. That's where it is.

Awesome. Alright, cool. Thanks for that mate. And a special thank you to all our supporters. A big thank you to everyone for listening. And as always, thank you, Vic. Always a pleasure, mate. Thanks for having me, John. I appreciate it.