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Starlink Maritime

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Re: Starlink Maritime

#371

Post by Robotbeat »

lxgr wrote: post #367
Robotbeat wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink has plenty of room for increasing their antenna size on the satellite size to something that a handheld could use. I was surprised how small the phased array on the sat side is. Increase that to make it similar to the size of the satellite (not counting solar array) and with the larger v2 satellites, and they'd have much more gain (allowing the handheld antenna to be smaller). They essentially already use 5G…

Isn‘t part of what allows much hire bandwidths for Starlink due to spatial frequency reuse, which requires mandatory beamforming on both sides of the connection? There are many satellites overhead at any given time (the current LEOs and MEOs usually have just one), so terminals need to be able to limit their gain to a small angle not only for gain reasons. Steering in handheld applications seems very difficult. Of co…

Modern cellphones with 5G (and wifi, etc) do beamforming already.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#372

Post by dylan604 »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #275
dreamcompiler wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would only buy you one increment of offshore range gain; it wouldn't cover the whole ocean unless you had a huge network of ships and used multiple up/down hops. And at that point the overall latency would suck so bad your customers might be better off with GEO.

It would depend on how fast the internal relay latency is on the ground terminals. Geostationary satellites are up at around 35,000 km. Starlink is about 500-600km - you can get a whole lot of hops between Starlink satellites and terminals before you're looking at the same distance. There's talk that they might be able to use either existing terminals, or a special set of terminals to do this, without the need to dep…

>They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too.

Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?

Re: Starlink Maritime

#373

Post by roflyear »

oxplot wrote: post #349
andrew_ wrote: post #290

We still need a 12v solution for the peasants that boat offshore. The current monthly fee represents a full year of boat payments. Definitely not targeted at consumers.

You can easily use an inverter to go from 12v to 110V/240V and just use the stock adapter. Alternatively, you can get your hands dirty and do what I did [1]. However, I'm fairly certain that the non-maritime accounts won't be able to use the service on water (most likely geofenced) so that Starlink can sell their maritime version. [1]: https://blog.oxplot.com/powering-starlink-on-the-go-with-tes... EDIT: looks like i…

Maybe....maybe not... It depends if it will work using the new sat tech if it ever comes out. As it stands you just have a different (I wouldn't even say better) version of 4g....

Re: Starlink Maritime

#374

Post by [deleted] »

ncmncm wrote: post #341
oceanplexian wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, the laser links may bring Starlink below terrestrial latency for point to point communications beyond a certain distance. Light travels through fiber at 7/10ths of the speed of light, but pretty much the actual speed of light through a vacuum. Once you get past the 340km * 2 round trip on both ends, you're actually moving bits around much faster than is physically possible with fiber. Probably even faster…

Chances are, you, dear reader, will not get any of this sweet, sweet, low latency. Most likely these laser links only go from each satellite to the one ahead and the one behind, in the same orbit. That is good enough. For example, there is an orbit that goes right over New York, London, and Hamburg. Who wants low latency most is hedge funds. It would be surprising if Starlink did not make anyone who wants it pay thro…

[deleted]

Re: Starlink Maritime

#375

Post by walrus01 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #371
lxgr wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn‘t part of what allows much hire bandwidths for Starlink due to spatial frequency reuse, which requires mandatory beamforming on both sides of the connection? There are many satellites overhead at any given time (the current LEOs and MEOs usually have just one), so terminals need to be able to limit their gain to a small angle not only for gain reasons. Steering in handheld applications seems very difficult. Of co…

Modern cellphones with 5G (and wifi, etc) do beamforming already.

Not in the same way that a flat panel phased array that maintains a fixed angle and aim at the sky can.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#376

Post by paranoidrobot »

dylan604 wrote: post #372
paranoidrobot wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would depend on how fast the internal relay latency is on the ground terminals. Geostationary satellites are up at around 35,000 km. Starlink is about 500-600km - you can get a whole lot of hops between Starlink satellites and terminals before you're looking at the same distance. There's talk that they might be able to use either existing terminals, or a special set of terminals to do this, without the need to dep…

>They're already in talks (trials, too I think) with Airlines to equip their aircraft with terminals. I'm sure commercial shipping companies would be interested too. Would an airplane using Starlink be more easily tracked in an emergency to avoid MH370 type of mystery?

No idea.

They may not track/keep that information, but there's no reason they couldn't.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#377

Post by Robotbeat »

walrus01 wrote: post #375
Robotbeat wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern cellphones with 5G (and wifi, etc) do beamforming already.

Not in the same way that a flat panel phased array that maintains a fixed angle and aim at the sky can.

Actually in exactly the same way. The nice thing about phased arrays is they steer electronically, so you can aim them extremely fast and compensate for any movement. That's how 5G works and that's also how Starlink on moving vehicles works.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#378

Post by tylergetsay »

caymanjim wrote: post #370

Everyone is assuming this caters to the rich yacht owner. While I'm sure that's a component of the target market, there are also plenty of other customers. Commercial fishing boats, coastal freighters, offshore oil platforms, cruise ships, various charter vessels, etc. It'd be worth it for a lot of businesses. And once it's available in the middle of the ocean, an enormous armada of freight vessels. $5k/mo is nothing…

Royal Carribean just rolled them out

Re: Starlink Maritime

#379

Post by Phlarp »

mlyle wrote: post #182
Phlarp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'll believe it when I see it. This whole "yea inter-sat free space fiber links are totally going to happen" charade smacks of the same hype baiting as "full self driving by end of year" nonsense that Elon has been spouting since 2018. The Starlink "team" did an AMA on reddit[0] last year and it was comical how empty the answers were. People asked about the space lasers and the answers were all "yea it's a really ha…

It's not that hard of a problem to do fast free-space optical in space within a single orbital shell. The only thing that makes it hard for SpaceX is the relatively small mass and volume budgets on their satellites to do precision pointing with, and that you'd really want each satellite to be able to do multiple links and that's taking up a lot of space.

The laser part seems easy, the targeting part seems hard. I'm imaging some type of gimbal, is there a better way?

Also seems likely that if they can find a way to make small sats with the ability to accurately point a laser at another sat, that would have pretty obvious implications to the defense dept. SpaceX is a military contractor after all.

Re: Starlink Maritime

#380

Post by oceanplexian »

_moof wrote: post #169
sillysaurusx wrote: post #146

Can anyone explain how the ping is so low on starlink? I always assumed satellite internet was always going to be inferior for online gaming, but everything I find online says that starlink is great for it. I guess I don’t have a specific question. It’s just one of those engineering marvels that I never thought I’d see. No wires, but still frag people at <90ms ping.

Starlink sats orbit at around 550 km altitude; other services are over 35,000 km high. That's 2 ms for a transmission to make it up (or down) versus 120 ms. Multiply by four to get the theoretical minimum ping, not including any computation/processing or routing on the ground, and the difference becomes enormous.

Makes you wonder if this could eventually lead to Datacenters in space, say for financial or latency sensitive applications, and the kinds of exotic architectures that would be needed for 17,000 MPH servers to shuffle traffic around.
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