(I am hoping others on this list with real-world AG experience can chime in? I enjoy realworld stories about present solutions and pain points[2])
I have often been dubious of the 5g hope to dominate any major component of a smart ag architecture except perhaps FWA, (where starlink is poised and people also want to run fiber) to give it a good run for the money- 5g chips are too big, too hard to power, and too complex, and come with a monthly billing model and other centralized requirements that make organic evolution and solid support in remote environments dicy and expensive. I freely concede that I may be wrong, that with sufficient subsidies, we will end up hanging the equivalent of a cellphone off of every suitably large piece of gear and ship all the data up to the cloud, rather than pre-process locally. Certainly the benefits of gps and drones are being shown every day, along with satellite weather and other forms of satellite analysis. [1] But the 5g sensor market? No. Nowadays smart sensors are easily constructed out of wifi devices such as these which cost 5 dollars or less: https://www.amazon.com/DORHEA-Development-Microcontroller-NodeMCU-32S-ESP-WROOM-32/dp/B086MJGFVV/ref=asc_df_B086MJGFVV/ And the more meshy LoRA stuff now has much better range (4 miles), at low complexity and power also. then there are things like amazon sidewalk: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b?ie=UTF8&node=21328123011 And airtags. [1] On the other hand rigorous analysis of the food we produce has recently discovered a marked decline in the percentage of nutritious minerals over the past 100 years. Please see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09637486.2021.1981831 How smart is that? [2] Massive subsidy and diversion of river resources to the water hungry california almond industry during the last 7 years of drought led to the cancellation of the salmon fishing season last year. You should hear some of the invective that I used to hear aimed at "the f-ing vegetarians" along the docks I frequent in half moon bay. That I used to hear, anyway, The docks are eerily silent, the workers at other jobs, the boats not going out for anything except crab and squid. How smart is that? The California water table is a disaster, too. I vastly prefer salmon to almonds personally.... I guess a meta point is easily gathering tactical data is one thing, sharing it sanely another, deciding on how to use it strategically, another. -- :( My old R&D campus is up for sale: https://tinyurl.com/yurtlab Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos _______________________________________________ Starlink mailing list Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
