4 ms·

>but unusable in storms Dumb Q - is satellite any better in a storm?

• MobiusHorizons 5y ago
  I would guess there is less interference between a ground station and a satellite than between two ground stations. Two main reasons: 1) The storm would have to be right on top of the ground station to be in the line of sight when talking to a satellite. For the 3g case, the storm could be anywhere along the 15km between the two ground stations. 2) Storms typically cover a larger area horizontally than they do vertically, so for most angles, communicating with a satellite should go through less of the cloud than horizontal 3g communication. I'm sure there could be storms where this is not true (eg a tall thunderstorm directly above the ground station), but my guess is that such storms are more rare.
• chris1993 5y ago
  Storms, and just heavy rain, consistently send our satellite internet offline. This is Australian “sky muster plus” pointing at a geosynchronous satellite at a higher orbit than starlink.
  • Jedd 5y ago
    To augment the other two responses here with some anecdata -- yes, storms would knock off my geostationary satellite connection in ways I didn't fully understand (it might just have been a huge bump in attempted utilisation for all I could tell at the consumer level). Starlink during storms, and we've have a half dozen big ones since I got this service 4 months ago, seems to do more re-acquires during those events (several seconds of drop-outs) but I'm not seeing significantly lengthy outages. The dish is still sitting on some concrete blocks on the ground, so it may simply be that it's wobbling more during the wilder winds.