How long does Dishy communicate with one satellite before switching to another one? It looks like they move across quite fast.
They move across the sky faster than an airliner, so not long.
Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
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Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#42In South Africa we have the Square Kilometre Array in the Meerkat National Park; I sincerely hope it doesn't come here. We don't need it polluting our skies. Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#43Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#44In South Africa we have the Square Kilometre Array in the Meerkat National Park; I sincerely hope it doesn't come here. We don't need it polluting our skies. Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream
That really isn't how orbits work... At any given time, there are as many starlink satellites overhead at Meerkat National Park as there are at any other point in the world around 30* north or south.
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#45Frequently Commented Questions: Yes, space looks crowded in these visualizations. But the size of the satellites is exaggerated here by thousands of times. Space is huge and the collision risk is extremely low. If displayed at their true size the satellites would not be visible, and indeed the vast majority are not visible in the real life night sky. The exception is recently launched satellites that are still in tra…
I took a screenshot of the default view on my web browser. The satellites appear to be around 100km in diameter, but they are in reality 7m wide, so they are 14,000x larger on the map than in reality. The entire constellation would fit within 0.2% of one of the white dots as they appear in the map. Then you need to remember that the space is 3D, unlike road surfaces (ignoring bridges etc.)
Put another way, it is like there are 10,000 fish equally spaced around the ocean. One could swim 100 lifetimes and never see another fish.
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#46I’m curious about how can they ensure connectivity for a particular area. Is it just that they place a bunch of satellites in orbits and hope that they have enough density? Or is there a method to the madness? I am assuming a single satellite covers very small area, in this case a single hexagonal area
The orbits are designed in such a way that the satellites are uniformly spread across the earth, with each part of the earth having at least one sat covering it at all times. That's the easy part: just launch enough satellites for your orbit altitude.
The tricky part is ensuring sufficient bandwidth. You either have to launch additional satellites so that there are 1/2/3/4 sats above every location at the same time, or increase the per-sat bandwidth. The former is probably a good idea anyways for redundancy, but costs a lot of money.
Increasing the bandwidth per sat is reasonably easy. They use phased antenna arrays to send a highly directional signal back to earth, which reduces congestion between different areas covered by the same sat at the same time. The limiting factor is probably the downlink back to earth via a ground station - there is only so much data you can reliably pump through a single connection. Their initial set had a 20Gbit downlink[0], but their newest ones can do 4x as much[1]. This bandwidth has to be shared by all people covered by the same sat.
So yeah, launch more sats and upgrade the downlink as required.
[0]: http://www.satmagazine.com/story.php?number=1026762698 [1]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/broadband/2023/02/27/spacex-s...
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#47[dead]
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#48I did something similar for my SpaceX interview:
Website: https://threejs-earth-satellites.vercel.app/05_equatorial_pl...
Github: https://github.com/amir734jj/threejs-earth-satellites
Beam Planner: https://github.com/amir734jj/beam-planner
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#49There's a bunch of Starlink coverage maps like this; the most useful one (IMHO) is Mike Puchol's at https://starlink.sx/ The nice thing about that Mike's is you can see exactly where you are in relation to nearby satellites and base stations. And get a pretty good guess as to where your packets are going to go. It is all guesswork - SpaceX only shares what they are required to by the FCC. But it's been pretty accurat…
The big problem with this one appears to be that it doesn’t load.
Works great in the current firefox.
Re: Live Starlink Satellite and Coverage Map
#50In South Africa we have the Square Kilometre Array in the Meerkat National Park; I sincerely hope it doesn't come here. We don't need it polluting our skies. Fibre should be rolled out for internet access, not another unsensible Musk dream
Yet starlink is available where broadband sometimes isn't, so the insensible dreams seem to be coming from those who expect broadband to be deployed even in the most remote parts of the world (not necessarily talking about the place you mentioned, but I certainly wouldn't expect broadband in places like a remote cabin in the woods here in Quebec, or in a lake hunting station).
Who cares if Elon is beyond this? I remember thinking how ridiculous it was that everything he did was overhyped and treated as the next revolution. But in a lot of ways discarding an amazing technology like starlink and being against it to own the musk is somehow even weirder to me. It's such a profoundly... online (terminally online perhaps?) outlook at things.
Like some people are unironically not buying Tesla's and openly saying that they went for a car they liked less just because the guy is a clown on twitter. Reminds me of conservatives who spite themselves just to own the libs in a weirdly self defeating way