Comment by gosub100
5 days ago
And phased-array antennae. The network would be next to useless if each receiver needed to track the satellite physically.
5 days ago
And phased-array antennae. The network would be next to useless if each receiver needed to track the satellite physically.
Beamforming is an old technology though. It's not hard to do, just a pain to do cheaply when you've got a bajillion emitters unless you have custom silicon.
>Beamforming is an old technology though. It's not hard to do
Well, so is satellite launch right? Cost, efficiency, and scaling are hard to do. That's SpaceX's entire raison d'etre. Doing a general public usable all weather maintenance free well designed phased array terminal they can sell for $250 and pump out by the millions is as worthy an achievement as near anything else in the Starlink project. And I'd love if it was more available too even terrestrially, for PtP/PtMP links alignment even motionless is a certain amount of work at long distances. And long range high bandwidth stuff isn't cheap. It'd be pretty cool if you could have units for $250 that you just needed to aim vaguely in the right direction and then it all just worked.
Hardware gets a bit easier in some respects when you have unit scale and don't need to make COGS+margin back on the sale. If Ubiquiti sell a base station, half of the unit price is gross margin. If SpaceX sell a Starlink terminal, they don't even have to cover COGS for it to be a good business case, because they're selling the service not the device.
The Starlink terminal is a very cool piece of kit, but it's not nearly as interesting as what they're hucking into LEO, and how they're doing it.
> Well, so is satellite launch right? Cost, efficiency, and scaling are hard to do.
The famous phrase 'Quantity has a quality of its own' comes to mind.
I disagree. Driving a small dish antenna only requires a couple of small electric motors. The receivers would be more expensive, and require more power, but they would still be affordable enough.
but what about the interruption when the satellite crosses over the horizon? you would then need a 2nd antenna that was ready to take over, or tolerate several seconds of lost signal.
They would break more often. This was a key limitation of LEO systems prior to Starlink.