Starlink Internet Connection equipment - Home/Office user

[xcont]

Let's hope it's not a big deal and she will be fine. 

[Mandella]

Don't know if you follow her on Instagram but earlier today Jessie Anderson was posting pictures and videos on her stories of she unboxing a Starlink terminal and installing it and showing everything and all. It has been taken down so I will not post any of those videos and photos given that it was likely she didn't have permission to show that. But it is true that it is a very simple system to install and connect to. She showed the instructions and things like that. The box is larger than I thought. "Pizza box sized" but... it was more like a large-sized pizza box.

I guess it bears repeating that this is a real beta test covered by a strict NDA. This is not early access, nor a free trail, nor a product demo. The service will be very rocky as Starlink constantly adjusts and optimizes their network. You will be expected to return all equipment at the end of the beta.

Breaking your NDA will likely see you having to return the equipment a lot sooner.

Being in a real product beta is kind of a job. If you are not ready to put the work into helping refine the product then you would be best suited waiting for the actual rollout and trying it then.

I hope anyone reading this is reminded to treat your NDA very seriously.

[Lar]

Don't know if you follow her on Instagram but earlier today Jessie Anderson was posting pictures and videos on her stories of she unboxing a Starlink terminal and installing it and showing everything and all. It has been taken down so I will not post any of those videos and photos given that it was likely she didn't have permission to show that. But it is true that it is a very simple system to install and connect to. She showed the instructions and things like that. The box is larger than I thought. "Pizza box sized" but... it was more like a large-sized pizza box.

I guess it bears repeating that this is a real beta test covered by a strict NDA. This is not early access, nor a free trail, nor a product demo. The service will be very rocky as Starlink constantly adjusts and optimizes their network. You will be expected to return all equipment at the end of the beta.

Breaking your NDA will likely see you having to return the equipment a lot sooner.

Being in a real product beta is kind of a job. If you are not ready to put the work into helping refine the product then you would be best suited waiting for the actual rollout and trying it then.

I hope anyone reading this is reminded to treat your NDA very seriously.

Very good points.

Please do not violate any NDAs no matter how excited you might be

[OccasionalTraveller]

I would have thought that Jessie Anderson, Lead Manufacturing Engineer at SpaceX (and frequent launch webcast host), would have known what she was and was not allowed to show! Apparently not.

Regarding polarisation, direct-to-home satellite TV in Europe has successfully used linear polarisation for decades, in some cases using the same frequency with different polarisation for different multiplexes. For example, on the UK+Ireland-focused Astra 2 satellites at 28.2°E, note 11264 MHz is used with both Horizontal and Vertical polarisation.

True, it's more common for the frequencies to be used in an alternating fashion (e.g. 10758 V, 10773 H, 10788 V), but note that these actually overlap: in this band, a symbol rate/bandwidth of 22 MHz is used while the distance between centre frequencies is only 15 MHz. (Transponders above 11.720 GHz use a 27.5 MHz bandwidth and ~ 40 MHz channel spacing on the same polarisation.) That may have been enough to prevent (significant) overlap in the PAL-FM analogue days, where the spectrum was approximately triangular, but DVB-S and -S2 try to maximize the available bandwidth and transmit approximately the same amplitude across the full channel bandwidth.

Maintaining the correct orientation for linear polarisation with a steerable dish is going to be harder than for a fixed one. However, some European enthusiasts do have motored dishes to select different clusters, e.g. between Astra 1 at 19.2°E and Astra 2, and others.

Sent from my Nokia 9 using Tapatalk

[Mandella]

I would have thought that Jessie Anderson, Lead Manufacturing Engineer at SpaceX (and frequent launch webcast host), would have known what she was and was not allowed to show! Apparently not.

I have to admit that I did not recognize her name and thought she was an just an early beta tester! You certainly would think that would be an official reveal.

I also hope that they got the issue sorted without too much stress on anybody's part.

[Poseidon]

There was nothing really secret or special to hide anyway, except the design of the router. It's not a big deal.
The real value is inside the antenna.

[fvasnier]

Maybe it should stay so we all report the video and get it deleted, she wrote in the comment that it needs to be

"Hi! Sorry, yes unfortunately it does violate the NDA so it does need to be removed" from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC87i1bjPumqYobMnYkIlBlQ

[Nomadd]

 I've been politely asked not to post closeups of the dish mechanisms. They sort of have a history of trying to keep things in plain sight a secret. (By the way, they're building a bunch of bigass rockets here)

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

An interesting thought.

If SpaceX can have (command even) each UT to point in a particular direction (tilt pitch and yaw just a few degrees up to 15 degrees would be enough). That because of the tilt the RF link margins are higher just because of geometry for the direction the UT is pointing vs the off center electronic steered directions. Such that the preferred sats that the UT would connect to would be those in that direction. So that by scattering the pointing directions in a bunched grouping of UTs you improve each of the UTs bandwidth and lower the collisions (a packet term used predominantly in wifi link definitions where two or more transmitters are transmitting at the same time cause the packets sent to be corrupted or not recieved at all. This would make such things as a few thousand subscribers in a small town within an area of 10sq km to have a distributed loading onto multiple sats even as high as a dozen so that a 100 to 1 subscribers per channel would support as many as 2,400 subscribers in that 10km area.

[su27k]

The box for the user terminal, from reddit, photo taken by someone who is not a beta tester, he merely took the photo of the box in the lobby of his Seattle apartment building.

(For those who have watched the leaked unboxing video, this is not news, but since that video was wiped off the internet, this legit photo may be of some interest)

[Asteroza]

The box for the user terminal, from reddit, photo taken by someone who is not a beta tester, he merely took the photo of the box in the lobby of his Seattle apartment building.

(For those who have watched the leaked unboxing video, this is not news, but since that video was wiped off the internet, this legit photo may be of some interest)

Definitely a north american sized large deep dish pizza variety of box. Maybe extra large. Depends on where in Chicago you live...

[docmordrid]

The box for the user terminal, from reddit, photo taken by someone who is not a beta tester, he merely took the photo of the box in the lobby of his Seattle apartment building.

(For those who have watched the leaked unboxing video, this is not news, but since that video was wiped off the internet, this legit photo may be of some interest)

Definitely a north american sized large deep dish pizza variety of box. Maybe extra large. Depends on where in Chicago you live...

More a Detroit style pizza - they've baked them in deep auto industry blued steel parts trays for >70 years.

[su27k]

Public beta users are beginning to receive their terminals, a lot of images and speed test results on /r/starlink, too many to post, some examples:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jl7sfi/hello_there/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jl5qzl/someone_has_received_his_kit/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jl86zz/its_here_super_excited_for_this_the_setup_is_easy/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jl9w2g/starlink_router/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jlakg0/starlink_dish/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jl6ryk/heres_what_a_starlink_terminal_connecting_looks/

[su27k]

Public beta users starting to report experience in snow/ice weather, some experienced slower speed or service interruption and needed to reset, some didn't experience any slowdown:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/js06w2/starlink_in_the_snow_not_bad/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jrymdi/starlink_covered_in_ice_snow/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jq7ejn/winter_storm_results/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jqeyiy/good_speeds_during_the_first_snow_since/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jqedvw/snow_in_sw_montana_today/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jq4hwb/snowing_starlink_speedpingjitter_unaffected/

Additional findings:

No problem with rain though

Power usage measurement: ~100W continuous power draw

Thermal imaging of the dish showing ~1500 elements in the phase array antenna, front 32° to 40°, back 5° while ambient temperature is 20°

Confirmation that the dish doesn't work when moving

[Robotbeat]

1500 elements!

[ZChris13]

1500 elements!

The backside 15 degrees Celsius colder than ambient!

[Tommyboy]

1500 elements!

The backside 15 degrees Celsius colder than ambient!

Probably using a peltier as a heat pump to heat the front of the dish. Using a peltier instead of a resistive heater results in about 150% efficiency.

[ClayJar]

1500 elements!

I couldn't help myself.  I printed it out, grabbed a pen, and got to counting.  After blocking out a bunch of hundreds and then crossing out individual elements one at a time, I ended up counting a total of 1675 elements in the array.

After counting the array, I also noted that the spots around the perimeter total 36.

Anyway, and now to my regularly scheduled breakfast. 

[niwax]

1500 elements!

I couldn't help myself.  I printed it out, grabbed a pen, and got to counting.  After blocking out a bunch of hundreds and then crossing out individual elements one at a time, I ended up counting a total of 1675 elements in the array.

After counting the array, I also noted that the spots around the perimeter total 36.

Anyway, and now to my regularly scheduled breakfast. 

You mean cornflake counting?

I'm half surprised there isn't any asymmetric magic in there in that works conjunction with their automatic alignment motors.

[Nomadd]

1500 elements!

I couldn't help myself.  I printed it out, grabbed a pen, and got to counting.  After blocking out a bunch of hundreds and then crossing out individual elements one at a time, I ended up counting a total of 1675 elements in the array.
After counting the array, I also noted that the spots around the perimeter total 36.
Anyway, and now to my regularly scheduled breakfast. 

They have medication for that now.