“Only when I make right turns...”
 

Police ticket driver for sticking Starlink terminal on car’s hood

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Bzu-...19911_n.0.jpeg

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/2/22...arlink-antenna

A California Highway Patrol officer stopped a Toyota Prius on Friday that had what looks like a Starlink dish fastened to its hood, the agency said in a Facebook post. The “visual obstruction,” sitting right smack in the middle of the car’s hood, landed the driver a ticket.

“Sir I stopped you today for that visual obstruction on your hood. Does it not block your view while driving?” an officer said, quoted in a post on CHP Antelope Valley’s Facebook page. The driver replied: “Only when I make right turns...”

The driver told the CHP officer that they were using the antenna to have Wi-Fi for a business they run out of their car, the agency told CNBC, which first reported on the traffic stop.

“Yes, it is in fact illegal to mount a satellite dish to the hood of your vehicle,” CHP’s Facebook post continued, citing a state law that bars other view-obstructions like objects hanging from a rear-view mirror, or poorly positioned GPS mounts. “It’s about safety folks. These are the real stories of the Highway Patrol. Safe travels everyone.”

Starlink, SpaceX’s fast-growing broadband internet service, is in the midst of an open beta period with over 70,000 users across 12 countries, according to its CEO Elon Musk.

SpaceX doesn’t have FCC approval to mount consumer Starlink terminals on moving vehicles yet, but the company has been testing such capabilities for months — mainly for commercial use-cases like shipping vessels, large trucks and passenger airplanes. Musk has said Starlink antennas, as currently designed, would be too powerful for individual cars.

“The antenna for that high-bandwidth, low-latency thing is sort of about the size of medium pizza, which you could put on a car, but I think is more bandwidth than you would really need,” Musk said during a January 2020 earnings call. “Technically, you could buy one and just stick it on the car.”







[MM] lemme guess, aligning the dish?

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[/MM]

Back in "the good old days" (late 50s mid 60s) the Albany police would stop you, ticket you for anything even remotely blocking your vision. I got stopped and ticketed twice for high school graduation tassels hanging off my mirror. A friend got tagged for hanging his baby's first shoes off the mirror.

Now you can see blowers and carbs ,air filter sticking high above a hood and they do not get tickets for that. Speeding tickets another story.:D

That is some Portered up shit, right there. :yesnod:

A friend of mine got a ticket in a tony part of Houston called Bellaire. Cop wrote him for window tint that was too dark. My friend said it was one gradient darker than legal. Cop did NOT use any kind of light meter on his couple year old Toyota Tacoma, just eyeballed it and wrote it up.

I think he can get it dismissed, because without checking, with a machine, how would anyone prove it's slightly over the limit?