Starlink Internet Connection equipment - Home/Office user

[StuffOfInterest]

I am worried about trees myself. I have good internet from charter, but if the price is right and I can get /54 ipv6 prefix from starlink, then I will happily jump ship. However I have four large trees surrounding my 2 story house, leaving maybe 50% of the sky obscured. My parents, who have no good alternatives live in a hardwood forest with trees on the order of 120ft tall.

For your parents, if they are out in the boondocks, I'd look at the self supporting towers used for amateur radio.  There are both fixed and crank-up tower options available.  The fixed ones are not that expensive and could easily get you up 30-50 feet.  That should clear most obstructions even if some of the trees around are taller.

[RedLineTrain]

In his interview with Irene Klotz in the run-up to DM-2, Musk states that...

The fully considered cost of the terminal is the hardest challenge for any space-based communication system that is meant for the general public.

...that will take us a few years to solve that.

About three-quarters of the way into the audio...

https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/space/podcast-interview-spacexs-elon-musk

Nothing Earth-shattering.  Basically, what we already know.  But it's good to hear it stated clearly.  And it's good to hear that the satellites are working well.

[su27k]

High-res photo of prototype user terminal, from reddit user u/darkpenguin22, photos taken at the Merrillan, WI gateway.

[gongora]

The same user terminals at Boca Chica site.  Photo by Mary.

[ChrisWilson68]

I'm surprised to see people worrying about how it will stand up to wind.  In my mind, I always saw it as a strictly indoor device.  Musk's "plug in socket" step implied to me that it's indoors and you're plugging it into a wall socket for power.  And since there's nothing about plugging in a second wire for data, I figured it has WiFi built in.  If it needs to be on a roof, I think claiming that installing it is as simple as "plug in socket" is pretty inaccurate.

Does anyone know how much degradation from going through a typical roof there will be in the frequencies Starlink uses?

[Arb]

High-res photo of prototype user terminal, from reddit user u/darkpenguin22, photos taken at the Merrillan, WI gateway.

Any guesses what the little lever like thing might be for?

Cropped from one of reddit user u/darkpenguin22's photos.

[Poseidon]

High-res photo of prototype user terminal, from reddit user u/darkpenguin22, photos taken at the Merrillan, WI gateway.

Any guesses what the little lever like thing might be for?

Cropped from one of reddit user u/darkpenguin22's photos.

Cable mount?


I have another question.
Is it only an antenna with a coaxial cable output, or does it integrate the modem, in other words with ethernet LAN cable output?

[AbuSimbel]

This is a plug and play device. You plug it in, turn it up and have your Starlink wi-fi ready to use.
It has a modem and WiFi router built in.

Edit: and judging from the well refined design it’s something conceived to fit inside your house, not just on the rooftop.

[Poseidon]

It has a modem and WiFi router built in.

No ethernet beside the Wifi?
mmh, installed on the rooftop and with Wifi 2.4Ghz connection (5Ghz won't go very far inside the house), you won't have more than a few hundred Mbps. A little strange for a Starlink connectivity in the Gigabit (theoretical) range.

Well let's hope they will have different versions of the device.

[Tuna-Fish]

I'm surprised to see people worrying about how it will stand up to wind.  In my mind, I always saw it as a strictly indoor device.  Musk's "plug in socket" step implied to me that it's indoors and you're plugging it into a wall socket for power.  And since there's nothing about plugging in a second wire for data, I figured it has WiFi built in.  If it needs to be on a roof, I think claiming that installing it is as simple as "plug in socket" is pretty inaccurate.

Does anyone know how much degradation from going through a typical roof there will be in the frequencies Starlink uses?

100% degradation. The frequencies they are using simply cannot be used to connect to satellites through anything more substantial than maybe a few leaves. It is very definitely an outdoor device.

[gongora]

The terminals are for outdoor use, and the cable seems to be PoE (power over ethernet, data and power on the same cable).

[Poseidon]

The same user terminals at Boca Chica site.  Photo by Mary.

Why do they have 5 antennas?

Even if we assume that their modem/chipset can't do carrier aggregation (4x256MHz) like LTE yet, they would still need only 4 antennas for load balancing at the router level (download).

[gongora]

The same user terminals at Boca Chica site.  Photo by Mary.

Why do they have 5 antennas?

Even if we assume that their modem/chipset can't do carrier aggregation (4x256MHz) like LTE yet, they would still need only 4 antennas (download).

A user terminal is a single one of those dishes.  I assume they want multiple terminals for testing purposes.  I don't know why they chose that exact number (there are also 5 at the Wisconsin site)

[matthewkantar]

These units are outdoors, the manufacturer put them outdoors for testing, I would bet a big stack of beer that they are for out of doors use. They may be testing units indoors, only Superman can see those, if they exist.

[Robotbeat]

The same user terminals at Boca Chica site.  Photo by Mary.

Why do they have 5 antennas?

Even if we assume that their modem/chipset can't do carrier aggregation (4x256MHz) like LTE yet, they would still need only 4 antennas for load balancing at the router level (download).

You could aggregate n terminals for ~n times the bandwidth (until that spot ran out of bandwidth). This is done with Iridium terminals, too. Doesn't have to be a power of 2 or whatever.

[Nomadd]

These units are outdoors, the manufacturer put them outdoors for testing, I would bet a big stack of beer that they are for out of doors use. They may be testing units indoors, only Superman can see those, if they exist.

You don't see a lot of indoor satellite antennas. Iridium might work through a thin plywood roof, but it's L band and a completely different type of comms. Pretty much an old style GSM system in the sky.

[ChrisWilson68]

These units are outdoors, the manufacturer put them outdoors for testing, I would bet a big stack of beer that they are for out of doors use. They may be testing units indoors, only Superman can see those, if they exist.

You don't see a lot of indoor satellite antennas. Iridium might work through a thin plywood roof, but it's L band and a completely different type of comms. Pretty much an old style GSM system in the sky.

I remember when I was a kid my dad got his first GPS unit.  To get a position fix, he had to take it outside to some clear area, far from any trees.

Today, GPS receivers often work perfectly well indoors.  This is not just because the receivers are more sensitive but also because they have the computational power to figure out and account for reflections that cause less-sophisticated units to be confused.

So there's precedent for improved technology making it feasible to use a satellite signal indoors that once required being outdoors.

I'm wondering if someone has some hard data on the frequencies Starlink is using.  How much is the signal attenuated by various kinds of roofs?  Is it so much that it's completely infeasible to have the antenna indoors or could it work indoors under some scenarios?

The fact that Starlink is testing antennas outdoors doesn't necessarily mean they intend for the final user product to only be used outdoors.  It may be that there's more work to be done to make it work indoors and they want to first get it working outdoors before moving to the harder problem of getting it to work indoors.  Or they might want to characterize it over time and in different whether conditions both indoors and outdoors to understand how much of what they're seeing is indoor versus outdoor.  And for operational ground stations they might use outdoor antennas because they get better performance from them even if they intend for users to put their terminals indoors some or most of the time.

One of Musk's two instructions is "point at sky".  The longer version of this might be to find a place where it can see the satellites, in your house if possible, but outdoors if you can't find a place indoors that can get a fix on the satellites.

Or, like the laser links, indoor antennas might be a goal they have that they haven't yet achieved.

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

The same user terminals at Boca Chica site.  Photo by Mary.

Why do they have 5 antennas?

Even if we assume that their modem/chipset can't do carrier aggregation (4x256MHz) like LTE yet, they would still need only 4 antennas for load balancing at the router level (download).

You could aggregate n terminals for ~n times the bandwidth (until that spot ran out of bandwidth). This is done with Iridium terminals, too. Doesn't have to be a power of 2 or whatever.

The key shown here is that with four channels separated by frequency. There is the capability for infinite number of spots only limited by the power and mass of the sat. Also with left and right twist circularization polarization. Each spot has 2 channels for each frequency used. For a 1Tb sat capability (if the 1Tb is the combined up and down data) it would represent 250 spots per sat with frequency being reused by multiple spots ~60 times.

Also this means that most or about 120 to 1 the handoffs from one channel to some other by the UT is from one frequency on a specific sat to another adjacent spot on that same sat but at a different frequency. Such that during the positional tracking of a sat the UT can resolve up to 8 channels on that sat. The 4 frequencies times the 2 polarizations. Also it would need to track a second sat for the every few minutes handoff to another sat. Meaning each UT effictivey monitoring up to 16 channels (8 on each of 2 sats). With more processing power a UT could produce a max burst data rate of 16Gbps. It would need significant software to enable this. as well as a lot more processing power than just monitoring channels vs actually decoding and bit error correcting data channel streams. Monitoring is the decoding of the status packet which occurs every so often. Do not know how often but it is likely at 1% or less of the stream data. Monitoring the other up to 15 streams besides the active data one needs only ~15% of the systems processing power that is needed to resolve the specific fully decoded data channel stream.

[gongora]

Before people get too far into analyzing that table of numbers, you should be aware that those numbers were from the first two test satellites, not the operational satellites.

[jrhan48]

The best public information I have seen on Starlink use of Frequencies is in SAT-LOA-20200526-00055/2378669, the license application for the 2nd Generation of the Starlink Satellites.

From that document, SpaceX expects to triple the overall bandwidth available on the present generation used Ku (12 - 18 GHz), and Ka (25.6 - 40 GHz)  The satellite to User downlink will utilize the Ku band frequencies 10.7gHz - 12.75 GHz (outside the US only), 17.8 - 18.6 GHz, 18.8 - 19.3 GHz, 19.7 - 20.8 GHz.

The document calls the frequencies above 18GHz Ku band, but others just K band, and some Ka above 20 GHz, so its blurry there, but I think SpaceX is using the Ku antennas for the band up to 20.8 GHz, and Ka band above 26.5 GHz

In this band, some attenuation from Rain/Snow is expected but in general it gets worse with increasing frequency, at the same time individual channel bandwidth grows.  This can be compensated by more power or larger receive antenna's

Both Ku and Ka band frequencies are normally used outside with direct line-of-sight to the satellite.  A metal roof would block either, and non-line-of-site is quite poor.  However, with some home modification, an RF transparent skylight to these frequencies (Similar to Radomes) could be installed and the antenna mounted below the skylight.  This could get one to "indoor" use, with I think 1.5 - 3K of house mods.  Not something worth it for most users.

The Uplink frequencies are mostly Ka-band frequencies, although one band reserved in the US for individually licensed sites, is at 12.75 to 13.65 GHz, and a second band is between 14 - 14.5 GHz, The other two uplink bands are at 28.35 GHz to 29.16 GHz and from 29.5 - 30 GHz.

Space X also had the ability to use "V" band (40 - 75 GHz) frequencies for 1st gen, I suspect between Sats and gateways, or possibly sat to sat.  2nd gen seems to have gone away from "V" band and Sat to Gatewy links will utilize the "E" band 60-90 GHz, likely due to better localization and increased bandwidth over "V" band.

There is a lot of information in the license application, and I recommend it for anyone who is seriously interested. 
Of course, the technical addendum where all of this is covered in depth is proprietary and not publicly available as far as I know.

Have fun