It's Christmas morning (or evening I'm my case). Real high speed internet is in my grasp. I was so tempted to just put the dish out in the yard and test it, but we are dealing with some pretty severe wind gusts the last week. I plan on making a trip to Menards this weekend and pick up some hardware to get this thing mounted, likely to the top of one of my unused chimneys. The reason is because after some research, I found out that the dish needs a clear view of nearly the whole sky. It's not like normal dishes that point SW to look at a geostationary satellite. This bad boy tracks the low orbiting satellites, which means that the dish is motorized.
I just finished opening the box, and so far I'm pretty impressed. Everything feels solid and well built. I did notice some minor surface scratches on the plastic parts of the dish, but nothing deal breaking. They could have been a little more careful packing, but its going outside anyway and will see its fair share of scratches soon.
I think my biggest gripe is that the ethernet cable coming out of the dish is not removable, so there is no way to use your own cut to length CAT cables. The jacket is also about twice the diameter of cat6, so making repairs/terminations on a damaged cable may be tricky or even impossible. Does that mean a damaged cable results in needing a new dish? Unless the damaged area is in a spot you can run it into punch down terminals or something watertight. There are 2 large diameter objects on each end of the cable. I'm guessing they are for surge protection, as the ends have metal for draining esd. This means that without cutting the cable, the hole will need to be drilled pretty large to get it through an exterior wall. It looks like there is about 100 feet of cable,, but I did not measure it. I really wish they made the dish with ethernet jacks on it similar to how Ubiquity makes their point to point antennas.
I was a little disappointed that the modem, which is definitely spacey looking, only has one ethernet out port. I also noticed that there is play between the dish mounting shaft where it plugs into the supplied mounting platform. I'll attach a video to show you what I mean.
I'm still pretty excited, even though I have a few initial gripes.
For now, here are some pictures. Hopefully if I can get it up and running this weekend I can report on the performance.