Nice tracker, Mike!

That said: It's not just a matter of geometry though. Presuming that a dishy aims itself at whichever portion of the sky it seems most satellites (with gateway service), there's another aspect to the elevation angle. The lower your elevation, the longer the path that the signal has to take through the atmosphere, and the higher the degree of service disruption as a result of rain fade, or in Tonga's case, potential ash cloud fading. In Fiji's case, Starlink also has to find a site with low elevation take-off to Tonga AND fibre connectivity. Plus they have to get past the regulator in a country that's know to regulate heavily and that currently experiences a lot of Covid-related disruption with people in badly connected home office.

Note that Tonga has had emergency service for a while now: Intelsat, SES and Kacific are all at present providing service (Kacific at 1 Gbps even). That's plenty for emergency use.

The big sticky point is that mobile Internet isn't working, people have to go to Tonga Telecom offices for access or wifi. That's an issue because 4 out of 5 households in Tonga rely on remittances from family overseas, which are usually sent via Western Union. Moneygram etc., whose apps are out of action right now.

And yes, the date line is fun. Pacific countries are known for having shifted it back and forth for spurious reasons, which is why it's badly bent, and these days I'm still grateful if people have maps online that don't end at the date line ;-)

On 8/02/2022 10:36 am, Mike Puchol wrote:

Placing a gateway at the Fiji teleport results in satellites that cover Tonga being serviced. However, satellite density, but most importantly, GSO protection, take out a significant portion of the coverage from the satellites.

They would need to lower minimum elevation (now 25° everywhere) to improve the situation. With things as-is, Tonga would be covered by 1-2 satellites which should be enough for emergency service restoration.

You can play around with this on my tracker at https://starink.sx, I will be adding the temporary gateway in a few minutes.

Please not that the date line causes some weird issues with the map and the algorithms, which I’m still trying to fix. You can thank whoever thought moving from -180° to +180° across a line was a good idea.

Best,

Mike

On Feb 7, 2022, 22:24 +0100, David Lang <david@lang.hm>, wrote:

the dish aimes at where it sees the most satellites, not necessarily 53. I took
my dish to a campground where there were trees to the north and it ended up
pointing straight up (Los Angeles area) performance was fine.

when you power it on, the dish tilts and swivels to point straight up (no idea
what the angle logic is), and after a few min of watching the sky will re-aim
itself if/as needed.

David Lang

On Mon, 7 Feb 2022, Ben Greear wrote:

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2022 13:18:49 -0800
From: Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
To: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: Re: [Starlink] Starlink for Tonga?

90 or even much smaller percentage is a lot better than zero.

I wonder if they can point the dish towards the horizon to pick up the sat
where
it can best see the functional downlink. I realize the dish auto-points
itself
now, but surely engineers that can design that can also design an 'off'
switch
for that and let their on-the-ground folks do some hacking....

Thanks,
Ben

On 2/7/22 11:05 AM, Christian von der Ropp wrote:

But in practice the satellites won't be sitting and waiting at the edge of

this 940km radius. They are moving in and out the radius and the question is
if

satellite density is high enough so that once the serving satellite loses

its gateway link there's another satellite in the 940km radius which also
covers

Tonga. And then this new satellite cannot be within certain elevation

angles (~60-80° at 0° azimuth) where the geostationary arc crosses Fijian
skies and the

gateway antennas have to seize emission. My gut feeling is that

availability in Tonga would be <90% simply because it's too far out at the
edge of a Fijian

gateway's range where there will be frequent service interruptions.


Am 07.02.2022 um 19:51 schrieb Nathan Owens:

The current coverage radius of a gateway/ground station with a 25 degree

minimum elevation is ~940km, so nothing in theory.

On Mon, Feb 7, 2022 at 10:50 AM Daniel AJ Sokolov <daniel@sokolov.eu.org>

wrote:

Hello,

I hope this is not offtopic: Starlink wants to build a ground station

on

Fiji to supply Tonga with internet.

The distance between Tonga and Fiji is about 750 km minimum. That's
quite the distance.

What does Starlink have to do to make this work?

Cheers
Daniel
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