71–80 of 89 posts
On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?
Does anyone have an image of what one of these ground stations looks like? Do they piggyback on some existing antenna shack? Or did they build their own from scratch? I also wonder whether they considered partnering with AWS Ground Station? https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/ Or maybe the Starlink constellation's requirements are not amenable to that?
There are photos here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/m8maa9/wise_nc_st... Across all the photos I've seen it looks pretty consistent, they build a fence and mount the antennas on small pads. It doesn't look like Starlink is building their own shelters (the ones in those photos are the carrier's). The carriers will readily offer rack space in their shelters for the right price but this does tend to sugges…
I am curious what the power consumption and bandwidth are for each of those units.
If this is going to work from my boat at some point, I'm never setting foot on land ever, again.
So far it looks like OneWeb is going to be a better option for marine use because you can actually find information about it within the industry already. With Starlink all we have to go on is speculation and the occasional tweet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For other sat phones and sat internet, if a country makes it illegal, the sat carriers don't provide service when you're in that country.
What happens if you are in a border area and one country its legal and one country its illegal?
As long as you make a moderate effort, so they don't feel inclined to jam your service or shoot down your satellites, who cares if the signal bleeds over the border by a few km? Not like they're going to make you double-illegal.
Very nice! What do the orange circles mean?
On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?
There are already a handful of countries that restrict the import of things like sat phones, CB radios, etc. The Starlink dish will just be on that same list of prohibited goods, and Customs will stop them coming into the country. (I was warned NOT to take a sat phone on my trek all the way around Africa - governments of countries like Rep. Congo, Sudan, Nigeria and a few others don't like civilians (especially forei…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moving users do not make a difference as the relative speed between satellites and users are dominated by the speed of the satellites which is kilometers per second vs. kilometers per hour for a moving user. The Starlink dishes and satellites are using phased array antennas by the way which can steer the beam extraordinarily fast without having to physically move the antenna at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phas…
> can steer the beam extraordinarily fast The beam steering takes about 10 milliseconds. That means effectively the beam can't be steered at all during use (imagine you steer the beam to one user, send a few packets to them, then steer the beam to another user, send a few packets to them, and repeat - thats a 20 millisecond jitter the users incur - completely unacceptable). That forces the beams to remained trained o…