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Starlink experience

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Thanks bxr. I appreciate the motors are just for set up purposes.

Yeah--some people assume there's physical tracking going on with the motors like a traditional dish, but the logic doesn't check out...each satellite pass is measured on the order of minutes, and for the thing to do motorized tracking, it would need to reset back to the western horizon for the next satellite pass...and somehow magically not drop service during the reset...

Do you have any insight into the beamforming capabilities ?

There's some good stuff in the FCC filings and even more stuff in teardown videos, but in general its kind of what you would expect from a phased array. There's a ton of individual elements, so the array can form a bunch of beams (hundreds). There's regulatory approval to go down to 25° elevation--which is also where the PFD mask starts to drop off--but that's with a motor assist from the UT, not because it has a 65 ° half angle... The UT can form a few simultaneous beams, mostly to support the obvious need for make-before-break handoffs.

(I guess if there are none, then presumably the intent will be to include them in a mobile-unit fairly soon, because the military will be screaming like crazy for them).

I wouldn't hold my breath.

For one, NFW will the military use Starlink, at least for any meaningful comms. It doesn't pass muster on security, since there's effectively a global set of potential access points to the network...secure military traffic would necessarily be routed alongside everything else and The Man does NOT like that. There will eventually be a US military

Also, mobile starlink isn't exactly a slam dunk--the FCC will have to approve SX using their spectrum as MSS. I can see this happening pretty easily for commercial applications, but I'm not so sure it will flow all the way down to consumer level. There's also the rest-of-world problem too, and that generally includes international waters (which regulate spectrum use for services like Inmarsat and Iridium

And, if it does get approved for mobile use, especially at the consumer level, I'd expect any sort of stabilization issues to be managed by forming larger beams, not by some mechanical method.