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Has there been a breakthrough on how small an Iridium receiver/phone can be? Because otherwise I'm going to call BS on this report. LEO satellite receivers are
by yokem55 5y ago
Has there been a breakthrough on how small an Iridium receiver/phone can be? Because otherwise I'm going to call BS on this report. LEO satellite receivers are typically much bigger than what can be crammed into an iphone.
- baybal2 5y ago> Has there been a breakthrough on how small an Iridium receiver/phone can be? Smallest devices being able to access satcom were the size of a pager 15 years ago, and most functioned like that. Power envelopes definitely allow for that, especially if you only need to send individual messages of few hundred kilobytes.
- est31 5y agoI've thought you can have really small satellite phones? Think something like Thuraya SG-2520 from 2007, or NAL Shout Nano.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoand there is still no room for a headphone jack.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoall the apple ifanboys can't take any criticism, eh?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y agoI have a Garmin InReach Mini. It uses the Iridium satellite network. No calls, but it can do texts and data. It’s dimensions are 23x23mm. It worked quite well in the Arctic wilderness this summer. So I would say putting satellite capability within a phone size form factor seems quite achievable. I was quite happy to read this news simply for the fact that if true it should hopefully cut into the arm-and-leg price Garmin charges for me to use my InReach to access the satellite network.
- rhn_mk1 5y agoFrom https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/592606 https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/592606 > 5.17 x 9.90 x 2.61 cm That's the same order of magnitude of volume as a phone.
- gregoriol 5y agoExcept the size of the antenna!
- unraveller 5y agoThe designer dongle bag upsell will have the antenna. Think smart-casual remote adventurer.
- mrfusion 5y agoWould it work in a forest or inside a cargo container? Or does it need line of site?
- lxgr 5y agoForest (usually) yes, cargo container (most likely) no. As a rule of thumb, if you can’t get a GPS fix, you won‘t be able to use Iridium either.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y agoIn addition to the sibling comment, it worked for me inside my tent - so it can work inside some containers provided the signal can make it through.
- kilroy123 5y agoI used the bigger bulkier one back in Antarctica several years ago and it worked great with the old constellation. If this was baked into an iPhone I doubt the server would be cheaper.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoSmall satellite receivers are possible and exist for extremely low bandwidth signals. Text messages could be feasible. There are small devices on the market for sending texts via satellite. The part of this article about FaceTime calls over satellite sounds like editorialization, though. FaceTime requires a relatively large amount of bandwidth to pull off, which isn’t in the realm of possibility with current systems.
- ben_w 5y agoHow much data would be available? Apple have been doing stuff adjacent to this NVIDIA announcement (116 bytes/frame of key-point data, with a GAN or a 3D model for reconstruction) from last year since at least Memoji: https://youtu.be/NqmMnjJ6GEg https://youtu.be/NqmMnjJ6GEg
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vitaflo 5y agoIridium operates at 1620 MHz. Many cell signals operate much lower than that (ie some 4G at 700mhz). If you can fit a 4G antenna in a phone you can easily fit one for iridium.
- turminal 5y agoThe problem here is the distance to the satellite, which is an order of magnitude bigger than what 4G technology is capable of.
- jsjohnst 5y ago> If you can fit a 4G antenna in a phone you can easily fit one for iridium The frequency isn’t the issue, it’s the distance it needs to transmit. Increased output power/longer distance needs a bigger antenna. Iridium / Starlink / other LEO satellites are >300 miles above the earth. Your smartphone doesn’t have even remotely enough power to transmit that far, good luck getting even 1/10th that distance for even a very shaky connection. As a concrete example, your phone’s cell radio transmits at 100-200mW into an antenna which has minimal additional gain. Iridium / Inmarsat phones transmit at around 10W into a higher gain and significantly larger antenna. That’s two orders of magnitude more EIRP in the end. Apple might be able to do an emergency beacon like transmission from an iPhone into LEO, but assuredly can not do a continuous transmission like in a phone call, even at very poor audio quality, without a relatively massive change in phone dimensions.
- vitaflo 5y agoTransmit power has nothing to do with antenna length. In fact if you change the antenna length you change the resonating frequency of the antenna. Satellites are also line of sight and most sat antennas radiate straight up instead of multi-directional like cell antennas. In any case iridium devices usually output max 2w. Same as 4G.
- jsjohnst 5y ago> In any case iridium devices usually output max 2w. Not according to Iridium’s data sheets I just read and provided values in my post > Same as 4G Nope, back in AMPS days power could be up to 2W, but 4G UEs are almost always limited to a maximum of 23dBm (aka 200mW). > Transmit power has nothing to do with antenna length. Correct if you are purely talking about antenna design from a generic pov. In the case of a phone, it does matter because you can’t transmit 10W into an omnidirectional antenna pressed up against someone’s ear due to current regulations, so it necessitates moving the antenna further away (hence one reason sat phones have a “whip antenna”, but there are other reasons too). This effectively makes the antenna “larger”.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoI would also raise an eyebrow at power consumption/battery life