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
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
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