WirelessMoves

I’ve been following the development of the eSIM on this blog for 6 years now and in recent years, I’ve been downloading and testing eSIMs to see how the process actually works. However, all of that was for learning and educational purposes only. But now, finally, I’ve used an eSIM ‘for real’ to get me out of a slightly disconcerting situation.

Let’s continue where I left off in the previous post on the Speedify Internet backhaul bonding and redundancy software I installed on a Raspberry Pi, and have a closer look how throughput looks like in practice.

Every now and then I am at places at the fringe of the observable Internet where I only have slow, weak and unreliable connectivity. Typically, though, there are several of such networks to chose from, for example because network operators share towers. Wouldn’t it be great if one could combine those networks to get some more speed and reliability out of it? Until recently, I wasn’t aware of an easy way to do this. But then I noticed a world traveler on Twitch who regularly streams while driving, even at remote places. His solution: Combining Internet connectivity from a Starlink dish on his RV’s roof and two cellular connections with a software called Speedify on a Raspberry Pi. Hm, sounds like this is just what I need.

One thing I was pretty certain about when I bought my Starlink terminal was that I would put it in places where power would not be readily available. Maybe only a few meters away, but still, out of reach. As the Starlink router requires a 110/230V power source, a USB battery pack doesn’t work. And even if it did, most USB battery packs could not supply 55 watts on average and 70-80 watts during startup. So I was looking for another solution that could supply power for at least a few hours.

If you are in the business of looking at decodes of LTE or 5G signaling messages, you’ve probably been at the point when you wanted to copy and paste a part of that message into an email. The problem: More often than not, the parameters you are interested in are deeply nested in other parameters. 60 to 80 spaces in front of parameter lines are not out of the ordinary these days. Looks pretty ugly when copied and pasted and the result is often totally unreadable. So I was looking for a way to remove a specific number of spaces of all lines of a text file. Should be an easy Google search I thought, but the result was quite disappointing.

In the previous post on using a Wi-Fi channel in the 2.4 GHz band connecting my Starlink terminal in a courtyard to an in-house receiver, I noticed that the 20 MHz channel was limiting my speed to around 60 Mbps. That’s far less than what Starlink supports and also far less than the roughly 100 Mbps that a 20 MHz 802.11n channel supports in the 2.4 GHz band on the IP layer (130 Mbps on the PHY). At first, I thought that there is little that can be done about it, as the channel is clearly power limited. Focusing the signal energy in a certain direction might help, but there are no antenna connectors on the Starlink Wi-Fi router to which I could connect directional antennas. But then I noticed an interesting effect when increasing the channel bandwidth.