[Starlink] Main hurdles against the Integration of Satellites and Terrestial Networks

[Steve Stroh]

Correction - Dishy has a motor AND a phased array antenna.

Dishy figures out the best direction and azimuth to orient the antenna and
uses the motor to do so. The phased array then tracks the orbital
progression of each satellite it chooses to use for maximum SNR.

I’ve read that the motor can also be used in creative ways like tipping
itself to as close to vertical as possible to remove accumulated snow.

You can choose to lock (disable) the motor - I’ve seen this done for fixed
installations like RVs and boats and if there are no obstacles such as
trees and there’s a sufficient density of sats in your location, “motor
off” mode can work reasonably well.

Steve Stroh

On Sun, Sep 17, 2023 at 10:09 Alexandre Petrescu via Starlink <
starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

>
> Thanks for the description.  It is an advanced and interesting antenna
> behaviour for a consumer product.  It is good the mechanical motor is
> replaced with phasing.
>
> More advanced phasing is probably used in their antenna version for
> automobiles, but might be the same principles.
>
> Then, for ships, where more 3D-imensional like movements exist,
> replacing big motors with phasing can represent significant gains in
> terms of space occupied.
>
> It is interesting it consumes more on receive than on transmit. Thanks.
>
> There was a pointer here pointing to an ETSI document about what might
> be a sort of certification (access to medium to not disturb the
> others).  In it, it seems a different freq is used for transmit than for
> receive. (12 vs 14GHz, or so, or vice-versa). The difference in frquency
> might also be a factor (in addition to the dsp calculus you mention) in
> differentiating the consumption up vs download.  I'd expect working with
> higher freuencies to require more energy.  But I am not sure an ETSI
> document can be for US starlink end user device.
>
> Alex
>
> > --
> > ****************************************************************
> > Dr. Ulrich Speidel
> >
> > School of Computer Science
> >
> > Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
> >
> > The University of Auckland
> > u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz
> > http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> > ****************************************************************
>
>
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