Anyone Using a Portable HughesNET Gen 5 Setup for Internet?

Cannot speak to the portable systems, but if you are looking for a portable sat solution you may want to also explore Viasat. (old exede)
Their new sat is going online now and they are starting to offer unlimited data plans for some high capacity users.

The Excide (old Wild Blue) was not designed for portable work.. Do not know if they have upgraded enough.

Musk is launching internet birds soon they tell me. Do not know if this will be part of the existing Wild Blue/Excide/Viasat network or a new competitor. Should be interesting to watch (There is yet one older name for that system but I can not remember teh spelling.. "Irridium" or somethign like that my speil clunker don't like)

The setup from Mobile Satellite Internet works great. It's not as fast as most ground based systems but it's pretty dang good and it works anywhere you have a clear view of the Southern Sky (possibly US only, I don't remember).
No cellular signal, no problem. You are on line without any dependence upon a local cellular tower or someone having a usable WiFi.
The satellites to be launched "soon" my Musk is years away. It will eventually involve something like 450 satellites ringing the Earth in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and will not work with or like any existing Geostationary antennas. I doubt it will ever happen due to cost to launch and expenses to maintain but I also would never bet again Musk on any project!

kerrlakeRoo wrote:
Cannot speak to the portable systems, but if you are looking for a portable sat solution you may want to also explore Viasat. (old exede)
Their new sat is going online now and they are starting to offer unlimited data plans for some high capacity users.

Better make this Viasat Reviews part of your exploration of Viasat.

Bill.Satellite wrote:
The setup from Mobile Satellite Internet works great. It's not as fast as most ground based systems but it's pretty dang good and it works anywhere you have a clear view of the Southern Sky (possibly US only, I don't remember).

The Mobile Internet Satellite HughesNET Gen 5 portable system coverage is lower 48 states + some Alaska coverage -- but very little if any Canadian coverage:

The Echostar 19 satellite covers everything but the three areas circled in red, which are covered by Echostar 17.

kerrlakeRoo wrote:
Cannot speak to the portable systems, but if you are looking for a portable sat solution you may want to also explore Viasat.

For an RVer, the only two solutions I would consider are the rooftop automatic RVDataSat 840 or the HughesNET Gen 5:

Following HughesNET Gen 5 vs DirecTV photo from Hitchhitch web site



While the RVDataSat 840 has better coverage than HughesNET Gen 5, the RVDataSat costs $6500 (not including installation) + all the data plans are much slower than the Gen 5's. For example, an Access 200 plan costs $129.99 mo - 1 year contract, 1.5 MBPS down, 300 KBPS up. However, there is no data limit!

A HughesNET Gen 5 portable system will set you back about $1600 and the data plans are much faster. For example, The Business Internet Mobile 75 plan (50 GB Anytime / 25 GB 8 am-6 pm) costs $169.99/mon + there's a 2-year contract.

We travel and boondock for much of the summer and I do a website for a union and my main site (see below) and need good internet. Hada DataStorm Sat System for 10 years and it got 1.2M down but stopped working as old technology.
So got one of the first deployed HughesNetGen5 Mobile unit.
Normally the new Gen5 service is only for stationary use but we are allowed to use it as a mobile and that means we don't have to call Hughes to get registered when we move. This is a spot beam service so a lot more complicated. After noticing we were not following pointing procedures, we discovered what we were doing wrong, and it came right up and we locked on to the spot beam. Much easier than we thought it would be. Not much more than setting up a DirecTV portable dish. We got this system through the wonderful folks at http://www.mobileinternetsatellite.com/index.php
Barb and Joe are great to work with and made it so easy to learn how to make this work for us and got us moved up to get this as we were pressed for time leaving the Tucson area.
Now a few things to know about this mobile service. Hughes requires you to buy a business account through a vender like above and use a .98 dish unlike a residential .78 oval dish (like a DirecTV dish). So a little bigger to carry around but it is 3' 3" round so not that huge. All you need to know is at the above link and feel free to contact Barb with questions. We could not be more happy with our service. Oh and BTW Hughes gives you unlimited downloads for the first 20 days so you can update any large files you may need. And if and when you use up your download limit they don't cut you off but allow download speeds of about 3 Meg. So even that is fast for satellite internet, methinks. My old DataStorm F1 dish that I had for over 10 years had a max of 1.2 download speed. With this, I will still have double that speed even when over my download limit. WOW can't beat that. And as a backup we have Verizon 4G grandfathered unlimited data when in a good service area. And if in poor service area we have a Willson WeBoost Cell Amp we are good to go with a backup system.

was_butnotnow wrote:
We travel and boondock for much of the summer . .
.

Have you used your HughesNET Gen 5 in Canada at all?

I have the setup from the link in the initial post. The only issues I've had at all are locations that don't have a clean line of sight -- you sort of have to plan for that when choosing a spot sometimes.