[Starlink] Starlink D2D observation - fwiw

[Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>]

Last week, I found myself driving into a disaster area - I was on leave 
and the southern North Island of NZ got hit by the worst weather in 
three years (since Cyclone Gabrielle, basically). We were booked to stay 
for a few nights at a Department of Conservation (DOC) lodge in a remote 
valley north of Palmerston North.

Access roads to the area are all precarious - potential for slips, 
flooding, washouts, bridge damage are ubiquitous there.

My initial fears that we might have to flee the place overnight were 
assuaged the moment I saw that the lodge was well above river level. To 
our surprise, there was 4G terrestrial coverage also. The lodge has 
mains power, too. On site: My wife, me, a Kiwi tramper, and two French 
cyclists.

Forecast was for 140-180 mm (~6-7 inches) of rain overnight. So we 
weren't overly surprised to find that the lodge had no power when we 
woke up in the morning. We also soon found out that the 4G coverage had 
gone. We had a mains+battery-operated fridge for food with us and a bit 
of battery lighting, and there was a woodfire for warmth and cooking, 
alas it initially appeared that we would have no water - the rainwater 
tanks only release their treasure via pump... until we discovered a 
hidden tap later in the day.

After breakfast, the local farmer from up the road turned up to let us 
know that all roads out were blocked. He is also a radio ham and had 
limited UHF comms out. At that point, I discovered that my phone now 
showed One NZ SpaceX as the network - even though I don't have a 
compatible plan. So it appears that One NZ turned the service on in the 
disaster area (which is very sparsely populated).

The service appeared to be text only (no WhatsApp or anything IP-based 
worked). My phone (Samsung A56) was the only one of five in the lodge 
that worked with the service, similarly, among three phones in the 
farmer's household, only one - a recent iPhone - worked. Sending a text 
message took around a minute each. I only sent a few - to our emergency 
contact, a friend who we'd said we'd go visit the next day, and one on 
behalf of one of the other lodge guests. So it's a small data set.

As expected, coverage was much better outdoors, although it seemed to 
occasionally manage to pick up the network through a window as well. 
Sending text from indoors didn't work for me at all. But having that 
option was nice.

One road opened again the next morning, and the power came back on later 
that day, along with the 4G coverage.

-- 
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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