Hmm - what to say - IT nerd who’s had great adventures in life so far! Enjoys travel, Tesla, eating Keto, and spending time in the U.P. KB8OHV
Michigan, USA
Joined March 2009
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So this was an interesting week. Porsche showed Mission S. Tesla flipped a Roadster over a truck. Two very different approaches to the development of new sport cars. Also cool to see what a couple decades of research can do from this video back in 2008 w/ Jay Leno with one of the early Roadsters before the Model S came out.
Surprise Broadway night. It was The Notebook at Devos. Had three beers beforehand so I was laughing at a few parts. Not bad actually.
Just watched, decent marketing of the new product features like zoom / tracking, privacy per person, shared and private access to apps like iMessage etc up to 6 people. This will sell for Apple focused ecosystems.
I guess it’s that time of year for pumpkin spice software. FSD v14.3.12 and Halloween Mode (2026.38.5) are rolling out wide to HW4 and HW3 Ryzen cars. Halloween Mode is rolling out a ghost avatar, spooky sounds, and new light show.
Two wildfires are still burning in Michigan. The Ridge Fire northwest of Marquette is about 256 acres, with evacuation "Set" status along North Basin Drive. The Craig Lake Fire in Baraga County is about 309 acres, in rugged terrain. Scattered showers today should help. Stay safe out there.
300+ Cybercabs in Austin after one month. Dallas is next.
From the U.P. that still feels like sci-fi — my daily Tesla problems are still deer, dead zones, and winter range. Wild decade.
In parts of the U.P. you lose signal the minute you leave town. SpaceX's 800 MHz buy could change that in a year.
Great write up below with a snippet of details / history on cellular frequencies and how starlink got this new spectrum, for people who live in the boonies, this could be a game changer. No wonder stocks of Verizon, att, and T-Mobile all took a hit yesterday.
T-Mobile spent five years trying to get rid of the exact spectrum Elon just called "the last critical piece" of complete phone coverage in America.
This 800 MHz block is Sprint's old Nextel spectrum, the stuff that powered push-to-talk walkie-talkie phones in 2004. The DOJ forced T-Mobile to divest it as a condition of the $26 billion Sprint merger. Dish had first rights at $3.59 billion and walked away because it couldn't raise the money. T-Mobile finally offloaded it to an investment firm called Grain Management last year for $2.9 billion plus a spectrum swap.
Grain's original plan was selling it to utilities for private networks.
Fourteen months later, SpaceX buys the whole portfolio, and shares of the carriers who passed on it fall as much as 8% in a single afternoon.
Here's why it matters so much. Starlink's satellite signal at 2 GHz can reach your phone outdoors, but it dies at the first wall. 800 MHz penetrates buildings. Most phones already have the band built in. So satellites handle the open sky, this low-band layer handles indoors, and suddenly Starlink Mobile covers everywhere a normal carrier does without the tower network.
Stack the moves. $17 billion for EchoStar's 50 MHz of 2 GHz spectrum. FCC approval for 15,000 Gen2 satellites this week. Now the low-band coverage layer.
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile paid $81 billion in a single auction for C-band spectrum in 2021, then spent years and tens of billions more deploying it on towers. SpaceX assembled a nationwide carrier out of a distressed-asset sale, a forced divestiture castoff, and rockets it already owns.
The walkie-talkie spectrum from 2004 ended up being the piece that lets satellites replace cell towers. Nobody who touched it for twenty years saw that coming.
Now that’s impressive, not a total solution to issues, but a good way to buffer the spikes experienced. Nephew in Texas has the new Michael Dell son base at home doing exact same thing for Texas.
Tesla just had the biggest residential Virtual Power Plant event in history.
During peak demand in California yesterday, 85,774 homes with @Tesla Powerwalls delivered 601 MW to the grid, with the total fleet peaking at a record 634 MW, roughly the output of a large utility-scale power plant.
These Powerwall owners also got paid for the energy they sent back to the grid during this event 🔋
Good Saturday morning!
Where I might have slept in and just made first cup of coffee!
Grass is still wet though
Holy sh*ts that’s a lot of unmarked guns (beyond the drugs). See if this makes national news even :/
Until tonight I’d never heard of Mac McAnally, who sang with Jimmy Buffett, but tonight I’m hearing a dozen of his songs (and Jimmy’s). He’s solid.
Now singing Come Monday…
Figured it would be something like this, clearly an innovative design on new roadster to put a sh*tload of downforce down to get better traction.
