📼 The NTN stream is up — and it came with a free lesson in satellite link budgets. ☔
We walked the full nRF9151 Feather satellite bring-up: NTN modem firmware, the Soracom two-IMSI SIM dance, band locks, location, PDN — every AT command on screen. Then the live attach attempt ran headfirst into reality: five inches of rain in 24 hours, heavy cloud cover, and a satellite sitting about 30° off the horizon — exactly where my trees are. You’ll see the rig searching and retrying at CE-level 1 in real time, plus the full readouts (+CEREG: 5, CESQ, XMONITOR) from the day before, when the sky cooperated and it connected at RSRP −130 dBm.
That’s the honest picture of NTN today: when you can see the sky, it works — and the margin between “connected” and “searching” is thin. Exactly what you want to know before designing it into a product.
If you want the whole walkthrough as a PDF field guide, the signup link is in the video description. 📋
▶️ Watch: https://youtube.com/live/v8JwlKz39M4
