Oh how lovely.... an O/S flamewar in r.a.p.

While I tend to agree somewhat with your sentiments about MS operating
systems, they're not that bad if you run a decent software firewall
and antivirus package and make sure you check for updates at least a
couple times each day. You should think twice about the satellite
internet service, though. My boss lives out in the sticks, had it for
a few months and continously complained about it sucking badly before
he gave up completely on it.

I have to suggest the wireless connection myself. I have a wireless
internet feed to my house, from a tower that's 5 miles away and I can
get a solid 8 Mbps connection to the tower's WAP. I use a Linksys
model WET11 802.11b bridge (~$110 at Best Buy) and a 24db mag grid
antenna from www.fab-corp.com (~$70) mounted on a 30' pole outside my
house. The WET11 is mounted inside a weatherproof plastic box on the
pole directly underneath the antenna. I feed 6 volts DC up the unused
wires of the CAT5 cable to power the WET11 remotely so that my antenna
coax jumper is only 3' from the antenna to the WET11. Long antenna
coax is what kills distance performance when using cheap 802.11b stuff
for long-haul duty, so the shorter you can keep the coax, the better.
The WET11 comes with a 5V power supply, but the long CAT5 cable has
quite a bit of voltage drop so I pump 6V into it from a 2 amp power
supply at the computer end and still get 5V under load at the other
end up on top the antenna pole. See if one of your airport Linux
buddies has DSL or cablemodem service at his house and is willing to
share a NAT'ed feed. If he lives within a few miles of the airport and
you can manage to put up a pair of antenna poles with 24db antennas
pointing at each other, you've then got yourself broadband Internet on
a shoestring budget at your FBO. I'd approach your EAA buddies about
this plan. If they are into both building airplanes and Linux, they'll
probably eat this idea up.