Spent more than I wanted to for the hardware - about $500, but selected the 50 gigs for $50/month plan. I can turn it on and off if needed but at $50 I’ll probably just keep it on unless I get stupid with consumption. My primary purpose was to bring the internet with me when I’m doing ham radio stuff - nice to be able to connect to spotting websites, check QRZ, use Smartlogger & POTA and other online tools. It’s worth $50/month to me. I’ve also given thought to replacing the home internet - I’m paying for 500 megs but rarely get that, and the infrastructure in my 20-yr old HOA is dated and I sometimes am lucky if I get 10 megs. Fortunately that’s rare, but boy does it piss me off when it happens. I think I may use the mini experience to determine if I want to buy a regular sized one for the house. We’ll see.
I was out with the mini doing POTA last week and I drove it off of my bioenno 40 ah battery box. Since I tend to do QRP, the battery will last forever. I bought the device last Friday and was doing POTA with it on Saturday, so it’s an easy setup/configure and get on the internet.
I thought I would mount it in the Bronco, although the Bronco specific mounts are stupid, price-wise. I wasn’t going to spend another $500+ for a mount. I ended up spending about $40 and bought some ram mounts and use the pole connector that came with the mini.
Eyeball the Bronco and tell me if you can see the mini?
Now look inside…
I already had a power distribution system in the Bronco to support the radios. I plugged it into a 25 amp port, although it looks as if it only draws 4-6 amps on 12v. Nice to have power to spare. Using this mount will make it easy for me to pull the antenna and use with my battery box if I’m going to be far away from the car.
Here’s the power setup - this is all mounted above the back seat on a molle panel:
Still testing, but this was my download speed when I was driving around this evening at about 40 mph:
I have an Icom 7100 in the Bronco and may one day do HF mobile, but for now I’m doing DSTAR with a Shark RF Open Spot. I’ve previously connected it to my phone and it’s been ok, although there are some idiosyncrasies when connecting to an iPhone. I have the OpenSpot mounted up on the radio rack and power it via a USB-C connection to my power distribution system and it works well. I reprogrammed it to search for the Starlink WiFi and it connected right up. It may be me, but I think the DSTAR audio is a LOT more clear with the Starlink bandwidth than the iPhone bandwidth. All in all, pretty cool so far.
I was out with the mini doing POTA last week and I drove it off of my bioenno 40 ah battery box. Since I tend to do QRP, the battery will last forever. I bought the device last Friday and was doing POTA with it on Saturday, so it’s an easy setup/configure and get on the internet.
I thought I would mount it in the Bronco, although the Bronco specific mounts are stupid, price-wise. I wasn’t going to spend another $500+ for a mount. I ended up spending about $40 and bought some ram mounts and use the pole connector that came with the mini.
Eyeball the Bronco and tell me if you can see the mini?
Now look inside…
I already had a power distribution system in the Bronco to support the radios. I plugged it into a 25 amp port, although it looks as if it only draws 4-6 amps on 12v. Nice to have power to spare. Using this mount will make it easy for me to pull the antenna and use with my battery box if I’m going to be far away from the car.
Here’s the power setup - this is all mounted above the back seat on a molle panel:
Still testing, but this was my download speed when I was driving around this evening at about 40 mph:
I have an Icom 7100 in the Bronco and may one day do HF mobile, but for now I’m doing DSTAR with a Shark RF Open Spot. I’ve previously connected it to my phone and it’s been ok, although there are some idiosyncrasies when connecting to an iPhone. I have the OpenSpot mounted up on the radio rack and power it via a USB-C connection to my power distribution system and it works well. I reprogrammed it to search for the Starlink WiFi and it connected right up. It may be me, but I think the DSTAR audio is a LOT more clear with the Starlink bandwidth than the iPhone bandwidth. All in all, pretty cool so far.
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