Vladimir

StarLink could not find a power supply for my Generation One dish. Instead they sent me a new Generation Two dish at no cost to me and I set it up and got it running today. Not a painless conversion since I was all set up for my previous dish and the power and router lines all changed. It is not a mobile application. BUT.....more than fair in my eyes to send a new dish. No complaints on my part. I would have been simpler with just a new power supply, but it seems like a fair solution.

My neighbor said that StarLink has terminated all support for Generation One dishes. No parts, no repairs. If it quits working you are to buy a new dish. After a month I still have not heard back, nor received another power supply from StarLink.

Yes, but that would mean that tax dollars would flow to individuals rather than corporations. That doesn't work in today's political environment. The state maps are pretty much meaningless since the power grids do NOT follow state boundaries. Back in the 1990's the Sierra Club sued the Forest Service to stop its program of allowing the public to cut firewood to heat their homes. The suit was filed in Yakima County and in the initial brief to the Federal judge the Sierra Club noted that once people quit heating with firewood in Yakima County they would use "clean hydro power" to heat their homes. Simply because, eastern Washington generates an enormous amount of electricity with the Columbia River dams. I made a couple of phone calls to the utilities serving Yakima County and discovered that Yakima County electricity actually came from Colstrip, Montana at the coal fired generating plants. It was an interesting learning experience on how the electrical grid works in the northwest. Likewise, when it comes to wind and solar many sites show "generating capacity" which is not what was actually generated!!! For example, the BPA site shows wind as having 10% of the "generating capacity" in the Pacific Northwest. I actually called BPA and got the daily spreadsheets showing actually electricity generated by source.....wind came in at 1.4%. That is a far cry from 10% shown on the BPA site as generating capacity. The lawyers at the Natural Resources Defense Counsel published a paper that we would NOT need anymore electrical generating capacity since we could charge our electric cars at night. That would have worked in the 1960's. I used the California historical grid data and quickly found out that TODAY with the de-industrialization of the US, California actually uses MORE ELECTRICITY at night than during the day. It is not a huge number, but there is no free electricity available on the grid on night. People cannot charge their EV's at home, we need to build charging stations for people to charge them at WORK. Hmm, maybe we can start printing bumper stickers that say TURN OFF YOUR PORCH LIGHT, SO I CAN CHARGE MY EV. The western electrical grid is an Alice in Wonderland story....oh wait, maybe White Rabbit by the Airplane is a better analogy.

I visited North Cascades National Park as a Forest Service employee. It seems that the Park Service illegally posted the boundary line between the Forest Service and Park Service managed lands. I can understand since NPS employees have a hard time with a map and compass!! Anyway, the information on the Easy Pass trail is at the end of this post: https://usbackroads.blogspot.com/2010/08/whats-in-name.html It is a grind to get to the ridge where the National Park starts, but well worth it. If your lazy, the NPS posted the boundary a thousand feet below the ridge, but trust me you want to get up to the ridge. Wrangell-St. Elias was a total surprise. I got there in my RV. https://usbackroads.blogspot.com/2016/10/usbackroads-destination-dead-dog-hill.html National Parks were America's fourth best idea after the Declaration of Independence and Forest Service and BLM lands.

Yeah, that pretty much is the story. Before I retired I got the crime reports for both the NPS and FS. People do need to remember that on NFS lands, you have the god given right to kill yourself and the local county Sheriff will take care of it. BUT, for those folks camping outside of National Parks and Forest Service campgrounds, there are lots more mentally ill, and folks down on their luck camping on public lands. Practice situational awareness.

My power supply on the StarLink dish quit working. It was an adventure to find out how to contact StarLink, but finally determined that you VOTE thumbs down on FAQ in the troubleshooting questions and that opens a dialog window to contact support. It did take almost a week for support to respond to me. My initial request was on April 6th. It is now April 23rd and they have promised to send a new power supply, but in the meantime have closed my "case". Hopefully, I will be receiving a new power supply soon, but you might want to figure that it will take awhile to get your StarLink up and working. It doesn't look like they have an extensive customer support network.

Since you don't have a home base I would look into finding a small city as a "resupply" town. That you can swing by every six months to a year. A place that you can make doctors and dental appointments, get the RV fixed, do service on your vehicle, etc. etc. A place that you want to stay a couple of weeks as all these things get done. And in your case a town that your kids will enjoy spending a couple of weeks. Here is a link to resupply town discussion. Out west, I still use Eugene as my RV and vehicle service center. No sales tax, lots of services. Nice campground close to the center of town and lots of bookstores and other amenities. Rain, but no snow most years even in winter. https://usbackroads.blogspot.com/2010/09/confluence-state-park-wenatchee.html Good luck dealing with medical insurance. As others have noted, find a national-wide insurance plan that works pretty much everywhere. I do have a Preferred Provider Network plan, but not sure I would recommend it for a full-time traveler. You want something with NO GATEKEEPERS for obtaining medical service. It is a totally different world in the states for health insurance, compared to Canada.

Not in Washington state. https://ecology.wa.gov/Air-Climate/Climate-Commitment-Act/Cap-and-invest The first auction was held in last month and the state tax was 300 million dollars. That was much more than the state expected. The initial auction excluded the oil companies in the initial round, but the french fry potato processors were hit real hard I think. The next auction includes the oil refineries. Next auction, I believe is in a few months and then we will see the increase in gas prices, probably in the neighborhood of another 40 to 50 cents a gallon. The goal is to reduce transportation CO2 emissions by 20% in the near future. The expectation is that will result in $8.00/ gallon gasoline probably within five to ten years. California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia have all passed similar legislation. AND the dollars collected do NOT go to transportation. It is the perfect tax from a governmental point of view. The tax is imposed on the business and used for general governmental expenditures. Most people will blame the business. The interesting part is to reduce CO2 emissions from transportation will require $8.00 a gallon gas. We can reduce CO2 emissions by 20% by simply driving 55 MPH again. The Governors of Oregon, Washington, and California can do that tomorrow, they alone have the authority. For some reason, they want the money.

I have the same problem. I got a phone amplifier, but they are less useful these days since analog went away. Use this web site to keep track of cell service: https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=47.79731,-120.41513&z=12&b=om&a=modis_mp%2Ccellcoverage_t You should always know where the closes cell service is possible. StarLink is an option. The wifi calling works. EXCEPT my StarLink quit working and I am on day FIVE of trying to get somebody to respond to me!!! I did have a medical emergency a couple of weeks ago 70 miles from the nearest hospital. I was camped alone with only one eye functional. Not sure I handled that "perfectly", but you might want to write a plan for dealing with medical situations prior to the incident. Good luck. BUT, I do remember when I broke my ankle working in the Wilderness and got flown out on a Forest Service contract helicopter. The hospital called my wife and said...."your husband is ok".....She interrupted the phone call and said "of course, he's ok...he is out in the middle of the Wilderness". It is safer out there than in the urban areas, but in most cases your in charge of your "rescue".

It is my PROFESSIONAL opinion. You can always go look for a second opinion.

I pay $180 for three lines with Verizon. That is going away in the near future. With StarLink I have wifi calling EVERYWHERE. So I am thinking of switching to a very cheap phone plan with voice and text ONLY. Using StarLink for data. Looking a phone, internet and TV combined and how to mix and match the services. There is NO WAY that StarLink drops out from a service or economic point of view.

The important thing to remember is that we have another 40 years before the wildfire situation will abate on public lands. Nobody is showing ANY interest in preventing the wholesale burning of our National Forests, National Parks, BLM and US Fish and Wildlife lands. That said.....here is a trustworthy source on the risk to your house. Losing a home in a wildfire is a RARE event. You will burn down your house before a wildfire!! In a average year, ONLY 5% of homes are lost due to wildfires and that is an overestimate. Here is the opening page of the website: https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire/wildfirerisk If you want to skip and go to the data: https://wildfirerisk.org/explore/0/53/53007/5300077105/ This will show you the Wenatchee area, but you can add other towns and look at their risk as well. SMOKE.....is not as cut and dry as risk to your home. Quite frankly, SMOKE not the destruction of homes is the issue. The estimate is that we have 20,000 excess deaths EVERY YEAR in this country due to wildfire smoke. Since the start of the mega-fire era in 1988 that is a LOT of dead people. This site will give you a fire history since 2000. https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=47.48759,-120.29755&z=11&b=om&a=sma%2Cfire Again, I centered on Wenatchee, but you can scroll around. Smoke is like water, it goes down a drainage. So when your looking at this data set, pay attention to topography. Areas that burned in the past will burn again in the future, until we convert the vegetation to grass and brush which put up much less smoke for a much shorter duration. That is why in 40 years the smoke will abate, we will have burned down all the trees on our public lands. The next 40 years, smoke will be an issue throughout the US. For downwind communities they will be living with smoke for a long, long time. So smoke free places to live in the US. The list is pretty short in the western US. Coastal California north of San Francisco to the Oregon line. Stay away from San Francisco, remember smoke follows the drainage. In Oregon and Washington the coastal and Cascade forests will burn again, similar to the 2020 events in Oregon. Those were with east winds that blow the smoke to coastal communities. Not bad, your really talking about a month or more in some years. The problem is "little" fires like the one along US2 in Washington state that poured smoke into the Seattle area for weeks last summer. North Idaho and western Montana are primed to repeat the fire history of the 1910 fire. My professional opinion is that it will happen in the next ten years. That means smoke across the entire tier of US states all the way to New England. Unlike 1910, I don't think we will burn over a million acres at one time. They will be large fires, year after year that produce the smoke year after year. I don't know enough about east coast weather patterns to comment on smoke back east, but my guess is I would hug the Gulf Coast. Hope this helps on your decision where to move to avoid smoke. Really the coast region of California north of San Francisco isn't bad.

I take it from your comments that you are in Colorado Springs. I did look at the original document mentioned in the Washington Post article a few months ago. Not impressed. I don't think they had a forester or anybody for that matter with a background in natural resources and fire. The Forest Service has done a study on communities at risk in the Pacific Northwest. When we moved into our current primary home, my wife asked, "if we have a wildfire what do we do". My answer was "WHEN we have a wildfire, this is what we are going to do." Our risk of losing our house is 1% EVERY YEAR according to the odds posted by the Forest Service. That is probably about right. In the 20 years we have lived here, wildfires have burned up to our property line three times and we get evacuation notices every other year. I try and schedule a meeting with my insurance agent EVERY year. Contact your local Forest Service, BLM or state DNR office and talk to them about wildfires. You will get a honest opinion. I was working a fire in Montana when the Colorado Springs fire broke and all those homes burned. My BLM Supervisor called me into his office and showed me the air photos of the fire. His comment was " those first rows of homes were burned due to a wildfire, the other homes were lost to a urban fire." In Napa, Santa Rosa, Talent, Oregon and a host of other communities the first row of homes were lost to wildfires, but the rest were lost due to URBAN zoning and regulations. So I would stay out of "urban" settings next to wildlands. Those are ugly areas. On smoke. It is my professional opinion that we have ANOTHER 40 years of burning down our public lands before smoke is no longer an issue. I have seen ONE study that is more optimistic, that in the southern Sierra's it will be only 25 years before we burn down the National Forests and Giant Sequoia groves and convert them to brushfields. The Forest Service now shows the Rocky Mountain area with NEGATIVE tree growth for the first time since the Forest Service started keeping records a century ago. We are burning MORE TREES than we GROW on National Forest lands in the Rockies. But the smoke in Colorado Springs will come from elsewhere. We still have decades to burn down the National Forests of the northern Rockies and the coast ranges of Oregon and Washington. If your interested in the issue and solutions that work click on this link: https://californiasaf.org/2022/03/24/western-wildfire-position-paper-camp-70/ Wrote parts of it and signed my name to it. But a lawyer trumps a forester when it comes to forest management. The last 30 years of public forestry has proven that lawyers don't have a clue when it comes to managing forests. Vladimir

Hmmm, I got a place outside of Tucson and it rains TWICE as much as it does in eastern Washington!!! My daughter was talking before she finally saw rain for the first time in her life. We were waiting for the airport shuttle at the hotel in Seattle before flying to Hawaii. I told her that rain is what God made for people that have not built irrigation projects. But it does bring up the point that you need to focus more than on a state level for choosing a place to live. Out west, the micro-climates are very different. Yuma and Flagstaff are very different communities both on weather and other factors. My wife's comment was that she got tired of eastern egg hunts in the snow while living in Flagstaff. Working for the Forest Service I always had my "list" of towns and cities that I would accept as a duty station. Smaller towns and cities vary greatly in the quality of life for their residents so you had to chose carefully. My screen was sunshine. I was NOT going to live in western Oregon or Washington no matter the town. The second screen was a good community to live with family. Good communities are much better places to live. I actually wrote up characteristics of good communities, but the simplest and easiest test was to simply visit the public library!! Good communities, have good libraries. When you think about it makes sense. That as a criteria has never failed me. Financial considerations are important and it made a huge difference living in Washington state simply because of my low consumptive lifestyle. I would never move to Oregon for that reason, though, as a retiree the tax structure is different than for a working person. When your looking for a good community to retire, check out the library.

The last year of the Trump Administration the No Surprises Act passed Congress. It is worthwhile for RV'ers to understand the law. It provides protection from "surprise medical costs", particularly for emergency care. It puts limits on hospitals and medical communities on HOW they charge for medical care without prior disclosure. See this thread for my adventures with the medical system over $51. It turns out that my medical provider, simply made my doctor "out of network" for a physical IF there was a Medicare coverage. They actually set up TWO addresses for my doctor. One in network and one outside network and billed to maximize their revenue flow. With the No Surprises Act, they HAVE to tell me PRIOR to my appointment that for the purposes of my annual physical, I was "out of network". Well, that ended the scam. Nobody would agree to a insurance plan where being "in-network" or "out-network" is a event designed to maximize revenue to the medical facility. Everybody, should read the No Surprises Act and understand it. There are news reports that some medical providers are NOT following the law. Here is a brief synopsis from the other thread. Anyway here is some text from the government on the Act. What are surprise medical bills? Before the No Surprises Act, if you had health insurance and received care from an out-of-network provider or an out-of-network facility, even unknowingly, your health plan may not have covered the entire out-of-network cost. This could have left you with higher costs than if you got care from an in-network provider or facility. In addition to any out-of-network cost sharing you might have owed, the out-of-network provider or facility could bill you for the difference between the billed charge and the amount your health plan paid, unless banned by state law. This is called “balance billing.” An unexpected balance bill from an out-of-network provider is also called a surprise medical bill. People with Medicare and Medicaid already enjoy these protections and are not at risk for surprise billing. What are the new protections if I have health insurance? If you get health coverage through your employer, a Health Insurance Marketplace®,[1] or an individual health insurance plan you purchase directly from an insurance company, these new rules will: Ban surprise bills for most emergency services, even if you get them out-of-network and without approval beforehand (prior authorization). Ban out-of-network cost-sharing (like out-of-network coinsurance or copayments) for most emergency and some non-emergency services. You can’t be charged more than in-network cost-sharing for these services. Ban out-of-network charges and balance bills for certain additional services (like anesthesiology or radiology) furnished by out-of-network providers as part of a patient’s visit to an in-network facility. Require that health care providers and facilities give you an easy-to-understand notice explaining the applicable billing protections, who to contact if you have concerns that a provider or facility has violated the protections, and that patient consent is required to waive billing protections (i.e., you must receive notice of and consent to being balance billed by an out-of-network provider).

I have a low consumptive lifestyle, but relatively high income. When I moved from Idaho to Washington I thought I died and gone to heaven!! I could not believe how much more money I had at the end of the month. I did not mind paying taxes in Idaho. Idaho did a real good job of spending taxpayers dollars, but it was a small population state with some REAL expensive costs just due to the topography of the state. In Washington state, I paid to build sports stadiums for the two richest men in the world at the time. I paid to provide tax breaks to several of the richest corporations on the face of the earth!!! Thankfully, in Washington state the tax income comes primarily from small business taxes and sales taxes. AND Washington sales taxes exempt food, medical care, and a whole host of other necessities. So I never pay them to help out MicroSoft, Boeing, Amazon, Paccar, and a whole host of other mega-corporations. I do NOT regret that I did not pay my fair share in Washington state taxes to help MicroSoft, Boeing, Amazon, Paccar and all those other corporations.

Don't chase rabbits.....I have had ONLY ONE hunting dog that managed to run them down.

There are a LOT of advantages to having "residents" that do not live in the state. Until the vacation rental boom, our local county got a great deal from having very, very expensive homes occupied only on rare occasions. That all changed when it became party weekend every weekend of the year. I wonder what triggered the change of heart in South Dakota. One negative I heard about years ago, was the impact of RV'ers on South Dakota health insurance rates. RV'ers are older and get medical treatment in areas with a higher cost of medicine than South Dakota. Here is a story from 2004 on voting. Worth reading. http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2004/10/27_steilm_sodakrvvoters/ And a more current article. https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/03/05/thousands-south-dakota-voters-dont-live-where-they-register-news-watch/3065884002/ This is an interesting quote from the public radio article....... "Some states have taken action to block RV'ers from voting. Nevada accepts them as residents, but only allows RV'ers to vote in the presidential race. The concern in Nevada is that RV'ers might sway local elections." I wonder how that works....you can only vote in the presidential election???

I suspect the folks in South Dakota are worried as a small population state that close elections will be decided by voters that do NOT live in the state or for that matter have little interest in the state. I have a stick built home in a county in Washington state where over 40% of the homes are owned by people living outside the county and with the recent upsurge in AirBnb most of them went into the vacation rental pool. This resulted in a uproar by local residents and they started pushing for regulation of the vacation home rentals in the county. And there was a open county commissioner race right in the middle of the regulation push. The vacation rental folks sent out a flyer asking people to change their voter registration to Chelan County and of course, be sure to vote for THEIR candidate for county commissioner. She won the election by a very close margin. In Washington state, it is NOT illegal to register to vote if your not eligible. It is only illegal if you vote. The state never did get involved, but the Auditor told people NOT to do that. Nobody knows what happened. I suspect that is the issue in South Dakota. I have met hundreds of RV'ers with South Dakota plates in the last twenty years. Last week, I finally met a RV couple that lived in South Dakota as natives. It would be interesting to follow up and get the concerns of the people of South Dakota why they are raising the issue. Most small population states are pretty open to people moving to their states "on paper", but obviously there had to be something that triggered the issue.

It is not just full-time RVers. I have a off-grid vacation rental property without cell service or cable. I just recently put in a StarLink dish and it works well. More importantly, it gives our guests cell phone service. I can now get rid of the land line for 911 calls. I suspect I would not be that hard to identify StarLink ID's that function as business sites. They REALLY do know everything about you.

The EU can talk about ending reliance on chinese battery supply chains. But it is just talk. The only people that can end the West reliance on China energy chains are those that PRODUCE the material. Really, at this point it all depends on Africa. I would hope that the kids working on the mines in Africa will soon be paid fair wages.

The issue is way past fewer all knowing ads, faster browsing, and potentially fewer spam and robocalls. Many companies selling YOUR data are making inferences about your behavior and selling that information to employers and businesses. Safeway had a customer slip and fall while shopping. It went to a civil lawsuit at which point Safeway pulled the shoppers purchase history at the store and told the jury that he fell because he was a alcoholic given the amount of liquor he was buying. Nobody knows to whom Safeway is selling your purchase information. Safeway isn't sharing that information with their customers. Costco keeps track of all your purchases. In our case, it dawned on that we were buying cartons of cigarettes for my wife's mother who was a serious smoker. The purchases, however, show up on OUR shopping record. Costco swears that they don't sell your shopping information, but they violated HIPAA and paid a fine. If your going to violate HIPAA your probably not to concerned about your customers privacy. On a personal note about a decade ago a friend sent a on-line survey that asked political questions and then matched with the Presidential candidates running for office and also made an assessment of your political leaning. It was a real cool website. The question list was extensive with a hundred questions on a wide range of issues. They even let you go back to their assessment of your political orientation and see which questions were responsible for their characterization of you. In my case, in their eyes I was a "right-wing, Libertarian". I went back to the questions to see what "made me right-wing". It was the questions on economics. I have enough credits in economics that I actually worked for the Federal government as an economists. All my answers to the questions were CONVENTIONAL economic beliefs that are taught to all economists in college. I suspect the geek that did the labeling did not understand the difference between what is taught in economics in college, versus the political views of economic theory in the popular press. About a decade later I did a search on my name and one of the services was willing to sell to all comers my personal information, but it led with my political beliefs as "though registered as a Independent voter, Vladimir's political beliefs are those of a "right-wing, Libertarian" That followed a come on for a additional fee they would learn more about me. If I were still of working age and applying for a job as a economist there is a world of difference between telling people that I believe in conventional economic theory, versus that my thoughts were right-wing. As an employer would you hire a economist that was a "right-wing, Libertarian". Would you hire ANYONE that had been characterized a "right-wing"?? I used the normal privacy guards when I was on the website. But the power of relational databases to link widely separated data is amazing. We in this country, have a "social" policy similar to China's Social Credit scores. In our case, it is the private corporations that control Americans Social Credit scores. Here is an article on social media and Social Credit scores from Deustsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/hello-big-brother-how-china-controls-its-citizens-through-social-media/a-38243388 Worth reading. It is worst here, than in China. At least in China as a individual you can easily game the Chinese government. It is a lot more difficult to game Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other social media sites that are tracking and INTERPRETING your private information.

You might be right.....lets track this one over time and see how it turns out.

My point was that talk is cheap. But for "investing" talk is more important than actually having a product in the eyes of Wall Street. A joint venture with a "unnamed" company, in Morroco does not inspire confidence. Yes, I would look at investing in companies that are ALREADY working on the generation of hydrogen. Not just talking about it.

Here in the northwest Governor Inslee is bound and determined to carpet eastern Washington shrub-steppe habitat with windmills. The electricity produced by Corporate windmills MUST be bought by BPA at above market prices. This has displaced cleaner electricity produced by county owned dams on the Columbia River system. In spring, BPA must spill for migrating salmon and there is such a glut of electricity that the PUD's have to PAY buyers to take their electricity due to corporate windmills. Here comes the law of un-intendend consequences!!! The PUD's are moving from supplying electricity to California, western Washington and Oregon to using it to generate hydrogen. Not good news for rate payers in those areas. Great news for the small counties in eastern Washington that own the dams. The Douglas County PUD project will go on-line ahead of schedule in 2023 and it is scalable. So additional capacity can easily be added. Chelan County PUD is talking about maybe joining in the project. https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/douglas-county-pud-selects-contractor-for-18-2-million-hydrogen-plant/