311–320 of 496 posts
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47% of smartphones in the USA are Apple. Seems pretty ubiquitous. T-mobile has 110 million subscribers and the population of USA is 329 million people.
They don’t even have a majority, much less ubiquity.
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Yeah that's not how it works. You can't just "put the complicated antenna on the satellite, instead of on the phone" and declare this problem solved. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. I'm declaring shenanigans right now on Elon's pitch but what else is new. It makes me sad that this thread is full of (probably) SWEs in a complete froth who took this at face value with little understanding of how antenn…
Phased arrays are pretty cool, if I had no idea how they worked I'd be incredulous as well.
I watched the announcement. Knowing Musk, I'll believe it when I see it, but it sounds promising. Apparently the G2 Starlink satellites will be equipped with large antennas to support cellular users on the existing spectrum. Video was live-streamed, and still available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzli-Ww26Qs
Seems like it requires Starship to launch unless I heard it wrong? Its too big for Falcon 9. Starship is still not space ready so it seems like it really depends on that program moving forward before we see these satellites in space. Given Musk's track record, I expect probably a year extra delay before it finally is opened to users. He did mention that they will probably produce a mini version of the satellite if St…
How will this play with the national radio silence zone? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio...
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Yeah that's not how it works. You can't just "put the complicated antenna on the satellite, instead of on the phone" and declare this problem solved. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. I'm declaring shenanigans right now on Elon's pitch but what else is new. It makes me sad that this thread is full of (probably) SWEs in a complete froth who took this at face value with little understanding of how antenn…
Can you show your calculations for this? From the sound of it the Starlink antenna is going to be a 25 m^2 phased array antenna, which I believe would have impressive gain.
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Can you show your calculations for this? From the sound of it the Starlink antenna is going to be a 25 m^2 phased array antenna, which I believe would have impressive gain.
If this worked why is a Starlink receiver a cat-warming dish and not a cellphone antenna?
And because existing Starlink satellites don't have giant phased array antennas on them.
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Can you show your calculations for this? From the sound of it the Starlink antenna is going to be a 25 m^2 phased array antenna, which I believe would have impressive gain.
If this worked why is a Starlink receiver a cat-warming dish and not a cellphone antenna?
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FUCK yes. Can't wait for the Inreach to drop from $400 to $100.
That’s probably so low they won’t be able to launch anything to replace the live sats once they hit end of life
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I think the "complicated antenna requirements" still exist - they've just put the complicated antenna on the satellite, instead of on the phone.
Yeah that's not how it works. You can't just "put the complicated antenna on the satellite, instead of on the phone" and declare this problem solved. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. I'm declaring shenanigans right now on Elon's pitch but what else is new. It makes me sad that this thread is full of (probably) SWEs in a complete froth who took this at face value with little understanding of how antenn…
Another factor is that the antenna on a satellite can be in a pretty arbitrary rotation compared to the receiver on the ground. Circular polarization doesn't care about orientation. Further discussion here: https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/12414/antenna-polari...
>Satellite phones and communicators are designed to direct most of the energy upwards towards the sky. Your existing phone does not
Recent iphones run 2x2 MIMO on mmWave and 4x4 MIMO on LTE. They should be able to do a fair bit of beamforming.
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Oh, right. I agree with you on that front. I see it working this way: If you are standing on top of a mountain, right now you can’t send anything. With Apple’s upcoming announcement, you’ll be able to send an iMessage. If you try to send a SMS, it just won’t go through—-same as it would today. I hope Apple allows it for all messages, personally. But I could definitely see them restricting it, especially at the beginn…
> If you try to send a SMS, it just won’t go through—-same as it would today. I may be confused about the scenario then, because this does work for me. Specifically, when I turn off my cellular radio (I'm a T-Mobile customer) I can still send and receive messages to people not using iDevices.