Pragmatic - 118- Call Me Anywhere (Just Not Underwater)

0:00Welcome to Pragmatic. Pragmatic is a show about technology and contemplating the finer details and their practical application by exploring the real world trade-offs we dive into how great ideas can be transformed into products and services that impact our lives.

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0:53I'm your host, John Chiggy, and today I'm once again joined by my good friend, Vic Hudson. How's it going, Vic? Pretty good, John. That was so professional. It was? Oh, thanks, man. Mad props, mad props. Oh, what's yours? Thank you so much. So it's been a while. I checked. It has... Our last episode went up on the 15th of May in 2025. That means that it is nine months later. Yeah, I know. And technically it's not... Have we beat the bubble sort record? That's hard to beat.

1:22Since it's stopped. I mean, you know. But in terms of pragmatics. Somewhere Clay's shaking his fist at an iPhone right now. It's 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. Yes, obviously Mrs. B. I'm marvelous, Mrs. B. Yes. Our biggest fans.

1:51off a bubble sort. Anyway, all right. So where are we at? Oh, yes. Right. So the worst ever longest ever prior gap was only eight and a half months. That was between 100 and episode 109 and 11. 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 a good thing. But anyhow, we're here now. And that's how matters. So there you go. So yeah, for patrons.

2:17Last 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 want to do Episodes where we do have some topics that we do a little bit of a deep dive on but perhaps a shallower dive but still 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 you want really detailed analysis of stuff There's always causality if that's your kind of thing but in any case so So if so, you know, expect a few more episodes, hopefully fingers crossed over coming months, a subject to obviously to Vic's schedule and to mine, because it's a little bit, it's a little bit crazy in a bit. Yeah, a little bit. We'll make it work. We've talked about some good episodes I look forward to. Oh, yeah. Now we, yeah, that's true. So for for the listeners, yeah, Vic and I, before the show started, we're talking about different topic ideas and stuff like that. So yeah, we got some interesting stuff coming. So hopefully they'll be, I don't know.

3:15Interesting to us anyway. Oh yeah, we find interesting. But anyway, okay, the jury's out on how you feel. I guess you'll let us know. Anyway, the listeners may say, there's a Tylenol. They may say something. Oh, dear. I'm done. Yeah, that's what you say. Anyhow, all right. So a couple of a couple of points. I just wanted to add about the state of play with my other shows for those that are fans of the internet work as a whole and don't just listen to pragmatic.

3:43If you have been listening to or have come across my other show called Whiskey Whiskey, I've been making that now for about 18 months and I've just made the decision to stop at this point. So I'm taking a break from making Whiskey Whiskey most likely permanently and I'm just taking a step back from alcohol. I just feel like in terms of the net positive net negative of alcohol, I think I've reached the point where I just need to take a step back and assess my position on that. So at this point, that's all I have to say about it. I may talk more about in future, but for the moment that's that. Sometimes you have two men. Yeah, totally, right? Absolutely. And events that have happened in my life have sort of prompted me to reconsider my position on it as a whole, not just as it relates to me, myself, of course, but also some other people that I know. It's something that, yeah, have, like I said, time to reassess.

4:41Having said that, causality has reached another major milestone in the intervening period between last episode and this episode. It's now been running for a whole 10 years, a full decade of causality. So I had some sort of celebration. I did a special episode for patrons called causality, what went wrong with causality, which was the bullet. Yeah, I know. So if you're... Of course you did.

5:10Hey, man, you gotta do it. That's that is awesome. And also just the 10 years thing is awesome. Yeah, it's it's been well, we're wrong with causality. Well, it's funny. I thought because there's all these, you know, anyway, look, you know what? If I'm not going to spoil it, if people really, really want to listen, then, you know, 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 undo it.

5:39subscribe or unfollow if you want. That's up to you. Do what you want. But it got a lot of really great feedback from the patrons, and I'm glad I did it. It was a little bit tongue-in-cheek. That's cool. And I was also being a little bit critical on myself, of course, but then what else is new? I mean, if you're going to really analyze the thing and break it down, where are we wrong? Exactly. It's a one-man show. It's kind of hard not to blame that man. Well, that's true. I got nowhere to bloody hide, do I? Nowhere to hide.

6:09So yeah, I just I guess you could close your tortoise coffin door and lock yourself inside and hide, but I don't know that's necessarily good for anybody. Yeah, no. So look, I the world would miss you. I'm pretty sure someone had missed me. But in any case, yes. So moving on from that, not much else to say on the network side of things. I thought it might be a good idea to just quickly talk about some hardware upgrades and not upgrades, you know, on some of my equipment, because it's surprising how little has changed, but some things have. So I just want to say, I'm still rocking my ancient Mac mini Intel. It's still going, running Catalina, doing good. I still have my M1 Mac Studio. Nice. It is running Tahoe, unfortunately, but it's running it. I'm not a fan of liquid glass, and I'm not going to do a whole

7:07episode on this but I mean there are so many bugs in Tahoe that just grind my gears and I mean 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 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 on 26.2 when I went to close a browser tab in Safari and little little X button would just disappear.

7:35Oh. 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 close button comes up again. It's so infuriating. They fixed it in 26.3, but oh my God. Anyway, they're mine. All right, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna rant about it. I don't care. Fine. 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.

8:01But it seems to me like visibility is really suffered with liquid glass. Yeah. Oh, it's shocking. It's so. It's 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 has really suffered. Yeah.

8:29Oh, absolutely. And 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.

8:39And I was really hoping it would improve when Johnny I've left, and at least in the hardware side of things, we now have, oh, I don't know, an SD card reader in our laptops again. 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. Is it Alan Dyer? That's the one. Marco used to really rail against him, and I'm assuming he still does.

9:08It looks pretty, but functionality is suffering due to some other pretty. Yeah, near totally. Look, I looked at the... Yeah, first time I looked at Liquid Glass, I just like, 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 about that, at least not in the context of this episode. And I also feel like if you really want to listen to people whinge about it, there's plenty of other podcasts out there where people do exactly that. So...

9:36Let's just move on. Definitely. Suffice it to say, I still have my Mac Studio M1. She's still rocking and rolling and yeah, representing, which is great. I still have my iPhone 15 Pro Max ultra massive brick phone thing. It's still going strong. I know, right? It's still going strong and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. However, I think I'm on the 14 Pro Max. You're on the 14 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. Now, mine was the, mine's got the USB-C, which is fantastic. I think mine was the last one with the lightning port, which 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'm super glad that it's gone over the USB-C. We're down to one. Honestly, I'm all Chi or MagSafe these days anyway, so it really doesn't truly matter. Yeah, I'm much the same, but when it comes to transferring

10:34Like video files and oh I can see where that would matter the USB C is a is a blessing for sure But anyway, alright, so the one thing that I do have that I did not have Last time we spoke is I have a new MacBook so I used to have an M2 MacBook Air and now I have a M4 MacBook Pro and It is nice gorgeous. I love this thing and there was technically nothing wrong which says Uh, so mine's the, uh, it's the M for 32 gig of Ram. Um, trying to remember if it's the, and it's just, uh, just M for, um, but it, I upgraded the hard drive. Display says. Oh, sorry. It's a 14 inch, 14 inch. Yeah. 14. Yeah. I can't deal with, uh, the bigger size. It's just too big. So I love the 16. Yeah. I know. You gotta.

11:27go a soft spot for 16 inch laptops. I understand that that's fine. But for me, just I want the portability. Now this thing is heavier and unlike the M2, it has fans. The M2 MacBook Air had had no fans. I still love that. But the truth is still pretty quiet fans. Oh, yeah, they're quiet, but they are still non zero.

11:48Sound but they still make sound so like when this things cranking you will hear it, but in any case apart from that one thing and I just missed out on the m5 macbook 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 the company I've been at for 11 and a half years and I went to work for an electrical contractor.

12:14And to lead up a automation team, at least that was the that was the pitch anyhow. It's been a bit of a slow burn, if I'm honest, but the reality was that I needed to fire up virtual machines. And the problem is that some of these virtual machines running the just not just AutoCAD. They're pretty resource heavy. Yeah, it's the memory is what killed me. So the M2 MacBook Air did not have enough memory. So.

12:41I decided to just bite the bullet. I sold the M2, 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, and I'm glad I got it. 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 well, never mind. Yeah. Right. Can't hear everything, John. Well, you know, no, I suppose not. It's very philosophical.

13:08But 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 color that I liked. Uh, in terms of Apple watches and firmly in team space gray, much too many of our friends dismay. Well, look, no judgment. Like it's, it's like, apparently I'm a very boring nerd. Man, it's whatever works for you. And you like to look at it. You like to look at it. And that's totally okay. Um, But on terms of watches, last time we spoke, I'm like, you know, I'm really enjoying not wearing a smart watch. Well, I decided probably about six, seven months ago that I actually, all right, here's the truth, right? Truth is 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 what I mean? My Apple watch would tap me when my phone was ringing, right?

14:03I got so used to doing that. When I went to a dumb watch, I just didn't remember to put my phone on like loud, like not silent, like take it off silent. 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, then you're in trouble. Yeah. Then you're in trouble. Various levels of in, 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.

14:31I also thought to myself, this is a pragmatic application of tech in our lives. People take no kidding. So whatever you have to buy or get to prevent that message, you do it because you never want it. 100%. And that's what I end up doing. I decide, yeah, I'll bugger it. I'm going to get. So I got a series 10. I got four, six millimeter, just the GPS model. And I decided to do something totally different because you now have this fixation with stainless steel.

15:01I just decided, you know what? No, I'm going to go with black aluminium, just because I can. No ultra. My ultra days are over. I'm surprised. They're too freaking big. I can't sleep with them on. I love it. I love it. I know you do. That's fine. 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. Okay. So I love the fact that I've got the first gen ultra and it still has no scratches. 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.

15:54Make me smile giggle jump out of my skin and say I'm so glad I got this watch sort of thing it's just like it's it serves of purpose and it was not expensive which is 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 have fit. So right because I still got all my watch bands from the last 10 years. Of course as you do. Oh dear and so finally I just wanted to make sure that you knew personally Vic and for the listeners.

16:23that 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 going to say, but I'm impressed with your restraint, John. The dollar cost is what represents my restraint. You know, if you had asked me back when we recorded that episode, and I think you did. Yeah.

16:52I thought it was only a matter of time. I know. You made that point. You said, yeah, you're going to get one in the next few months. Just admit it. Something like that. You said, I think, and I'm like, yeah, probably. But no, I did not. 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 if you've got a lot of disposable income and you are just like, I want to have the coolest latest toy.

17:17That thing is incredible. It is still and that's that's exactly what you're getting. Yeah. 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.

17:45Yeah, totally. And I read a couple of blog posts just recently because I had another thought occurred to me. I'm like, oh, I could buy one of these second hand now. They've been out for so long. So I had look on Facebook marketplace, which also makes me feel dirty when I do look at Facebook or anything, but still.

18:05Well, I'd have to be dirty with you because like 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, honest, yeah, you're not wrong. It's it feels a bit wrong. But in any case, they they are half the price of a new one. But I still can't justify half the price. It's still too expensive. It's still expensive, man. That's a ridiculous amount of money. So what did that make it, 1600? 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, no. This is why John has not bought.

18:50an 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. About the only thing I can think I'd use it for would be, you know, like watching 3D content that I've either created or 3D movies or something, which I haven't actually created much 3D content or spatial content. And I don't have too many movies in 3D that I would just love to watch. And the other thing is that What's my wife going to do? Like, if I'm sitting there watching, I don't know. That's the thing. Why would I watch Avatar? But I mean, hey, Avatar in 3D 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 have one. So how would I know? Okay. So it's, it's like, it's such a solo experience, man. Oh, anyway, like, 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.

19:48No other tech really to do, to discuss or report or anything. Mind you, I think I still think that's planning, if I'm honest. But, but yeah. Anything from your side or have you still got much the same stuff as last time? No, just a lot of the job-y job interspersed with 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.

20:16Doing 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 low carb thing. And I've been making me a lot of burritos with these. I don't know if you guys have been in Australia. There's a company called Mission. Oh, yes. And they make a it's called a carb smart or smart balance or it's a low carb tortilla, which is.

20:42To say not really a low carb tortilla, but it's a tortilla where the carbohydrates are offset by a metric ton of fiber Well fair enough So like if you believe in the whole net carbs thing like it's 21 grams of carbs and then by the time you subtract all the fiber from it, it's 33 grams of carbs, right? Okay And I've been making like bean burritos and bean 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. Excellent. Yeah. One of my sons went through a phase where he ate nothing but burritos and my wife was like, you are aware that burritos are not a food group.

21:35And 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, it's definitely the way to go. And honestly, it's, uh, it's, um, It's also a more economical way than something like Wigowi or Monjara or Zempik, because that's really expensive. I actually even tried, I don't know if we ever talked about them on any podcast or not. About a year ago, I tried the Carnivore diet. You had any experience with that? That's like Atkins, is it? Sort of thing?

22:23It's it's like an Adkins or a keto diet on steroids. So you basically want only things that come from clay cover your ears if you're listening animals Lots and lots of beef pork Basically meat right meat butter that kind of things. Okay, no vegetable snow plants know 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 expensive a few moments ago. That's actually an expensive diet. I mean, you start trying to eat steak and eggs five, six nights a week. Yeah, that's not, that adds up. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if like your passion is like ribeyes and New York strips.

23:20Yeah, for sure. Actually, you know, the funny thing with meat, meat's gotten so expensive. 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 cuts of meat in the Woolworths Coals, you know, the local, you know, food store, I guess. And they've now got security tags on them. So on the meat? Yeah.

23:45Like the actual package. Yeah, I know it's because it's it's gotten so expensive that people have started like stealing it because 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 because the first time I saw it I'm like you're you're kidding me really. Right. Don't see you putting those tags on the bread. Anyway, all right.

24:07So nobody ever wants to steal the bread. Yeah, I know, right? Back in the day, still alive for bread got you deported from the UK out to Australia, so you convict you. It's fine. Actually, locally, they've been cracking down on illegal tobacco sales because the Australian government puts 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 thing that in, in Southeast Queensland, they busted like 200 stores, uh, selling illegal tobacco. That makes sense. That makes sense. Like even here, you know, they, they, they're smart enough nowadays that that's all behind the counter, but. God. All right. All right. So, um, I get, yeah, there's no part of getting old that's enjoyable, I think is a fair way to, fair way to put it.

25:06But anyhow, alright, so I think it would be a good time to get stuck in the main topic for the episodes. If you're okay with there's anything else you wanted to quickly throw in before we do. I don't know, man. We're only 27 minutes in. I think we got at least another 10 or 15 minutes. Oh, yeah. What's the more banter? Okay. No, just play it. Let's move on. Okay.

25:30So 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 kind of slowing down, isn't it? Yeah, it is. And this is so this is not what we're talking about. 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 technology. So the idea is.

25:59This 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 3G, 4G, 5G, LTE, all the Gs, everything. And right now, if you want to talk to a satellite, your only real options are that weird service that the new iPhone support on Apple, which is a very, very, very low bandwidth, very slow, very Not great, which is not to say that it's not useless. It's really honestly just meant for microburst transmission. Yes, it is. And it's like I tried it and it's obviously I was not in an emergency, but I got 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 kind of glad it didn't because it's not like I was in an emergency. I was just kicking the tires on it. So.

26:52it's sort of probably does work, but it's not exactly like you can just send a text message, yo, Vic, how you're doing is not going to work by that service. So in any case, then you've got iridium or global sat or these, all these other different brands of low earth orbit 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 smart phony. 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. Yes, exactly. And when I was working at the last company I was working at, because we had a lot of remote sites, so we would give our people not just land base, what is it called? Tetra radios, which are land based. We'd also give them satellite phones for when there was no Tetra coverage. But it's a specialized handset, right? And they're specialized satellites and so on and so forth.

27:50So what musky dear and all the friends at SpaceX said is that we're going to do a bunch of satellites in our Starlink constellation 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 kind of like roll my eyes, Michael, that's not going to work because and insert all these reasons here.

28:14But 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 want to have a look at this. And I first started researching this over a year ago, but it just kind of like hit the back burner because there wasn't enough, like they hadn't actually 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 I did speak about Starlink with Radek Petrushevsky back on episode 99. That was back in August of 2020. So I'm not going to 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 Radek is so cool. I liked it and his name is awesome as well too for the record. But never mind. So yeah.

29:09Have 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 Pragmatic? And I was like, why yes it is. Yes, fellow co-hosts, fellow co-hosts of Pragmatic Unite. Well, I think I wouldn't swear to it, but I think this was even before he had done the show.

29:35Oh, okay. Oh, fair enough. Like, I think he was a legit genuine listener back then. Oh, yeah, he was. And we started interacting, and the reason that I got him on the show is I found out how much he was into satellites and rockets and so on and so forth. So talking to him about Starlink and SpaceX was a natural fit, and he brought a lot to the show. It was fantastic. It was a good episode. It was. But in any case, all right. So as I say, from time to time, I worked at Nortel.

30:05back in the day. And I just know how hard it is to get 4G, LTE, and most recently 5G, to work from a terrestrial level point of view where you've got fixed towers, like the towers aren't moving, they're just sitting there. And that whole line of sight thing really screws this over. Yeah, it does. The range is generally limited to about 45 miles or 72Ks or thereabouts. And that's because of the curvature of the earth, obstacles, not just houses, but trees, buildings. Yeah, all of those, all of the things, all the obstructions, obstacles, whatever you want to call it. And you're stuck with line of sight. And that's, 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 pretty much anything can change in that regard is the weather. So if you've got really, really heavy, heavy rain,

30:58You will get a lot of lost signal because it just scatters in the ground in the rain. Of course, you know, satellites only useful as long as you're not underwater. And if you're inside. How water can distort those and reflect those radio waves. It's strange, isn't it? It's like you can call me anywhere as long as it's not underwater though. And.

31:24But in any case whatever the point. Yeah, it's not just that it obviously buildings its tunnels its mine sites So the next time you're down this 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. I should do I mean like where else do you expect to find Opus bar gold? Yeah, I know it's you can trip over it. 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 have a trip over bar gold ever Well, it was it was a lot of fun. I unfortunately had to give the bar of gold back because it wasn't mine. But anyway, okay, back on topic. That always blows. Yes. So the key was satellite communications and or any communication anyhow, it really is to maintain a solid link margin. And it gets very difficult to do that. Especially when you've got a little transmitter that can't really transmit very much.

32:17in 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 like lag or rather latency. So first of all, for Iridium satellites. So Iridium satellites, they're about 485 miles or 708 kilometers.

32:46above the surface of the earth. And they have a latency of around about 400 milliseconds plus or minus 100 milliseconds. So if you look at it roughly, it works out to 0.25 milliseconds per kilometer. But that's only useful when we talk about Starlink for comparison. But the reason that there's a decent amount of lag in there is that iridium is different because the handoffs are made between multiple satellites to get back to ground stations.

33:14Well, 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 ground station to get routed down to Earth again. And of course, vice versa. So because of that, it was a trade off that those ground stations have to cover a very large area. 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 a radium satellites, both of them in, you know, let's say the middle of nowhere in Kentucky or something and there's no coverage and I 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 helicopter.

34:06How are you 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 orbit. Now that means that, but their measured latency is vastly different. They only get 60 milliseconds of latency, which depending upon your point of view, if you're playing for, you know, 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 275 milliseconds if it was Engineered the same way is iridium, but it's not because we're styling there's a heck of a lot less delay because the handoffs can hand off to over 170 ground stations around the world so because of this

35:00The 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 going to get, even though the speed of light is really slow, but whatever. Right. So the speed of light is really slow. Oh, totally is, man. Yeah. Absolutely. Sure. Okay. Yeah. Well, it's like everything's relative. Anyway, all right. So Starlink has four. I'll give you that one. Yes. 4,400 satellites.

35:27Actually, no, they've got more than that. Hang on. No, this foreign satellites, they're being lowered. They're going to a lower Earth orbit. So this year, apparently, they're doing a whole bunch of satellite lowering. It's going to drop them down to 298 miles or 480 Ks. Now, obviously, that's going to improve your latency, probably by about maybe 10% better, maybe a little bit more. It's certainly not going to hurt.

35:50But that's not why they're doing it. Apparently they're doing it because there was a near collision with a Chinese satellite that was in a similar low Earth orbit because China is building their own low Earth orbit constellation because obviously why wouldn't you? So all these low Earth orbits are going to start getting littered with a bazillion satellites. And I tell you what, if you're an astronomer, oh man.

36:11You're going to be pretty dirty about that. There's so much junk floater out 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. But anyhow. Yeah. So there are total in total 9400 operational satellites in Starlink. Now I don't I didn't do the math exactly. It should be about another about.

36:37for three and a half thousand, something like that. They are actual, I don't know the exact figure, but they orbit slightly at a different altitude. So 350k, 217 miles. Anyway, so I only talk about the solar cycle just for a minute. So anyone that's into amateur radio or radio, like CB radio or everything, 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 roughly 11 years long.

37:04So they talk about 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 our skip or what's referred to as trophospheric 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 more so than at a minima.

37:32What I mean by this is it doesn't actually affect the signal exactly because at high frequencies that we're punching through, generally speaking, it will not care about propagation. Okay. But what it actually does is that charging of the atmosphere will actually physically slow down the satellites. So there's more drag, believe it or not. Okay. Because the reason low Earth orbit is dangerous is because, well not dangerous, but you put us only in low Earth orbit, it's the orbit will deteriorate with time to a point at which it will eventually get captured by the Earth's gravitational field and it's just going to come down. One day it's going to be a shooting star for somebody. Yeah, 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 they were waiting until after the solar maximum pass 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 then once they're up, they're just going to fall back down again. So there's this weird trade-off between

38:29We'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, actually, you remember that the movie Wally? And you remember that as the ship's leaving the atmosphere, it's like all these satellites are just going out of the way. And it's like, oh my God, that is what just feels like that's what it's going to be like.

38:58Anyway, all right. So let's talk about approvals. So the FCC approved up to 15,000 satellites to be launched for SpaceX covering the mobile satellite service or MSS and the fixed satellite service or FSS bands. So I got to mention the bands for completeness. So you got the KU band, which is 12 to 18 gigs. You got the KA band, which is 26.5 to 40 gigs.

39:26You've got the V band, which is 40 to 75 gigs. You can see the frequency is going up quite a bit now. There's an overlap with the E band, 60 to 90 gigs, and W band is 75 to 110 gigs. And you may think, oh, well, these bands, they're overlapping slightly. It's like, yeah. 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 all the aggregated data coming from the satellites to and from the ground stations. Because if you don't have that bandwidth, you can't take the satellite signals back down to the earth again and back up again. Just you need that bandwidth. So.

40:18Right. Anyway. All right. Now director cell satellites, they also have 800 megahertz to two gigahertz. That's to communicate with our smartphones, LTE mobiles on the ground. Okay. 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 is power. So how is this possible? Cause like an iridium phone has a dedicated antenna and it's a much higher gain.

40:46and it's got more transmit power as well. So 4G, let's just take 4G, and we go with our worst case scenario, top end of the spectrum, two gigahertz. Okay, that's worst case for penetration through atmospherics buildings and so on and so forth. Now, in terms of receive signal level, you're targeting anything better than about 90, negative 90 dBm. That's received power at the iPhone receiver. Right. But it's It's actually still usable down to about a minus 100 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 480 kilometers, assuming an isotropic radiator, which I've explained in the past, whatever, at two gigahertz, you're going to lose 150 dB. So that means your polyliphone antenna is realistically going to get you nothing squat.

41:40Right. It's really, it's pushing the only thing that it can push, which is power in the Starlink satellites. The only way you're going to make it work. So you got to have a much more powerful transmission to get down to the phone. 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 your satellite.

42:06And that satellite spinning around the world and it's only got solar power and batteries to keep it going. So right. So what I did because I couldn't help it is 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. You do. Yes. You have the reciprocal problem as well. So dealing with the downlink problem at the moment, though, this is how they've addressed it. So I found some design documents that talk about the gain.

42:33of a Starlink antenna being 38 dbi, which is 38 db over isotropic. So that combined with the power, they say gives it a total of 58 dbw. So that's 58 db watts. But the problem with db watts is the db watts is not like decibels nonlinear, right? So you can't just add and subtract it. It's logarithmic. 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 a hundred watts Which I could kind of believe that I think and that gets you about minus 83 dBm at the iPhone on the ground So that gives you barely above that 90 what it is, but it's still it's a you're about 17 DB above your absolute cutoff and you're about 7 DB above your ideal Which then because you could lose 20 DB and 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 you got bigger problem story about

43:44Yes, you do. Anyway, never mind. I really want to make this phone call via my Starlink thing. You're going to get struck by lightning. Yeah, I don't care, but I got to make this phone call. And that was the last thing we ever heard from him. Anyway, an order of pizza here. Yeah, pizza delivery to the middle of this field in Kentucky. Here you go. Oh, my God. Anyhow, so that's 100 watts to me, like for a ground station, that's like.

44:11That's par for the course. If I'm transmitting 100 watts at on HF frequencies, that's nothing, but 50 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 figured, you know, like, enough, enough at some point, but in any case, I mean, you dig too deep in that somebody's going to come knocking on your door.

44:40They 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, an order of magnitude more and then some. So as you are talking to on like one satellite, it's already probably getting too far away from you to switch to the next one along. And so what that means you can do is you can have a really narrow focus of your antenna. And of course that has another practical problem is that the narrow you focus the antenna, the less ground area you're going to 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.

45:25it 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 20 years, that's actually not too bad. So I actually... Okay. Yeah. So if I was doing like traditional cellular like before spread spectrum, before...

45:54Like 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 and that's Doppler. So the problem with Doppler is that as the satellite is approaching you, the frequency will shift higher on approach and then it'll shift lower as it departs.

46:21And that's going to 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 band rather than spread spectrum, which again, like I said, it's pretty much all we use now on smartphones or 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 bandwidth. Like you'll lose data and therefore your net data transmission rate will drop. So.

46:50But it's not the end of the world. It'll still mostly work. So. OK. All right. So the satellites 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 480 K's, that's a 94 minute Earth orbit. You hear people talk about 90 minute Earth orbits. It's like, you know, 94 minutes close enough. But there still has to be enough power in that to make phone calls and then to replenish itself, which means you're going to need.

47:19a lot of solar panels and decent storage on it, but it's constantly going to be charging up draining, charging up draining endlessly. So that is the first design. That's really rough on those batteries. Oh, it's rough on the whole bloody thing, mate. That's like the whole, like this is, it's the only reason that they could even really do this is the fact that if you make 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.

47:46which works. It's just you need a special handset. Anyway, right. One of the other little funky tricks that these the starlings do, which is not unique, by the way, to the director 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, is they can they're using laser for inter satellite communication optically. So that is very, very cool. 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 because there's no fiber optic needed. Right. I didn't mean it's pretty cool because I mean fiber optic is like a clean laser, some lenses and mirrors. Yeah, essentially. And it's kind of cool. So. All right. So that's about that's most of the techie tech stuff, I guess I want to talk about. But so by the end of.

48:352024, they were offering text messages only. And that was for end users or whatever else. There was a video called demoed in March of 2024, but that was just a demo. Now, originally, if I remember correctly, it was T-Mobile that they first did it in the States as their demo, but it took forever, well, not forever, like a year or something before it became more generally available. So there was even a WhatsApp call quite recently in December of 2025 from Kazakhstan of all places. And they had a data connection of four megabits per second, which frankly, it's not too shabby. That's on a standard. It'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.

49:29like a lot more of them. 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 going to be one of those things like the more people use it, the more satellites are going to need the same old thing, which is why they've applied for up to 15,000. 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. They've done the math and I'm like, all right, that's a lot of satellites, but on the negative side.

49:56There's apparently been some complaints from astronomers, I sort of alluded to this before, but the DTC satellites, because they have, 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.

50:26Space. Yeah. So like if you have a normal styling satellite and then a DTC 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 trial caused by the DTC one, whereas the traditional styling satellites were far less visible at Earth. They were engineered specifically to not reflect the sunlight, so they wouldn't annoy astronomers, but now the DTC, they're like, yeah, whatever. So I think the astronomers continue a little bit shitty about that, and I can't say I blame them, but anyway. So this is very cool tech, right? But I don't know if it's a net win or not. But anyway, they're going to 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 2026. So in Australia, currently, we only support messaging. So just text messaging only.

51:23And 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 with a rain don't fall over Christmas. 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. Interesting. Oh well.

51:50Now obviously I mentioned T-Mobile before there of it's available in the United States of course for an extra $10 a month us And in Canada, of course you got Rogers. So Rogers in Canada have got that depending on the plan It's an extra $15 Canadian a month. So similar kind of price range when you factor that in actually doesn't sound too unreasonable if you think you know, I think it's fantastic actually But there's also actually a bunch of others around the world that have got a bit 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 offering. Yeah, absolutely. Well, honestly, man, 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, you know, it's, I don't know. I guess there's this whole thing of, is it a solved problem?

52:44And the short answer is, I guess it was a solved problem provided you bought a handset. It's very appealing for anyone who has 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 minimum service, like an emergency service almost. It feels more like to me at the moment, rather than, oh, I'm going to go out to the middle of nowhere and stream a video.

53:11It's one of those things is kind of like insurance, you know, like. 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 Starlinx, sorry, SpaceX's strategy is to once the starship is actually working without blowing up and is able to land without blowing up or.

53:36falling over or whatever. I mean, they're making progress and it's going along really well for them, I guess, they're happy with it. 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 a few dozen at a time, a few dozen at a time, it just takes time.

54:03The satellites are only going to be good for about, I don't know, 10, 15 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. 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 orbit. It's still an expense and a cost though. Oh, totally. And it just, it kind of makes me wonder about their business model too, right? Because I mean, if they're only charging $10 a month for that and from T-Mobile in the States, I mean, how is it Telstra aren't charging anything for it? It's kind of weird.

54:31I don't know. It feels strange. 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, it seems like something that like the CIA and the feds and the Mossad and all of those type agencies would be all over. Yeah. Well, all I can say, Vic, is that If, okay, if you guys, if anyone listening knows, I'd be very curious, just like, shoot me a message, I'd be very curious to understand how the business model works. But I, to me, it's very interesting. But the tech itself is fascinating. In terms of the iPhone transmit power, which I realized I kind of glossed over, 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. But the interesting challenges come when you've got lots and lots of

55:31mobiles trying to talk to the one satellite at the same time. And they're in different positions and hence they've got different dopplers relative to the satellite is fascinating. But in any case, 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 work. It is for me. Yeah. It is fascinating. All right. Anything else you want to add or should we wrap it up? I think we could probably wrap it up pretty good. You covered it pretty good.

56:01Cool. All right, well, if you want to talk more about this, you can reach me on the Fediverse at chiggy at engineer.space or the network at engnet at engineer.space. 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. Visit engineer.network.pragmatic to learn how you can help the show to continue to be made. Thank you.

56:21A big thank you to all of our supporters and a special thank you to our silver producers Mitch burger, Shane O'Neill, Jared Roman, Katarina will Chad during Ian Gallagher and Jamie Russell with an extra special thank you to our amazing gold producers Steven bridle. Callan for deli's Fujimoto Steve Brannam and our gold producer known only as R. Now if you'd like to get in touch with Vic, what's the best way for them to get in touch with your mate. I can be fine on most platforms is because in one shoot me something if you'd like.

56:51probably find it within a few weeks to a month and reply to you. I mean, if you want the truth, that's where it is. Awesome. All right, cool. Thanks for that, mate. And a special thank you to all of 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. No worries.