15 ms·

SpaceX Unveils Redesigned Second-Gen Starlink Dish

68 points by drewrem11 5y ago

bpodgursky 5y ago
I talked to a guy yesterday who was looking forward to Starlink GA so he could get reliable uplink from an arduino sensor array on a boat used to service aquaculture farms in the middle of the ocean. I'm pretty optimistic about how much of the world this is going to connect.
- dienfosbei 5y ago
  That makes little sense to me. Satellite links have been around for ages. They are totally fine for an application like that where latency is no issue.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Not enough bandwidth, and it wasn't stable.
  - reportingsjr 5y ago
    Maybe said person is pushing many megabytes/month of data and not thrilled about data pricing from iridium or whatever other company. Or maybe they want to switch and support competition to decrease prices? It's kind of an odd choice unless significant power/energy is available. An iridium modem + Arduino doesn't need all that much power, but the starlink phased array antenna does.
wetpaws 5y ago
Almost 2x reduction in weight is very impressive.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  I wonder if they needed more powerful hardware in v1 due to a lower number of available satellites? Fewer satellites means potentially a further distance to beam the signal to. Now that SpaceX has had a while to roll out more sats, they can use less powerful radios that need less heat dissipation and thus save weight. Pure speculation on my part as I am not a hardware person, but I'd be interested to know!
- nybble41 5y ago
  Indeed, if they'd reduced the weight by 2x the original weight then they would have succeeded in inventing anti-gravity. The 0.425x (or 42.5%) reduction in weight described in the article is not quite that impressive, but is still quite a respectable achievement.
curtis3389 5y ago
But what is its name?! Dishy McFlatface Jr?
- joshuamoes 5y ago
  Unfortunately it looks like it is being called Rectangular Dishy McSquare face? https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkInstallGuide_Rectangular.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkInstallGuide_R...
savant_penguin 5y ago
"However, one drawback to the second-gen dish is the lack of a built-in Ethernet port, which can be found on the original Starlink dish. Instead, the company is selling an Ethernet adaptor for the dish via the Starlink online shop. " Did they just pull an apple here?
- stefan_ 5y ago
  It's worse than that. "To connect a 3rd party router or mesh system, you will need to purchase the Ethernet Adapter from the Starlink Shop to allow for a wired connection to the network. Bypass functionality is coming soon, and we are actively working on development of a Starlink mesh product." Previously, you could just throw out their shitty falling over WiFi thing to connect what you want. Now it's a dongle.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jhgb 5y ago
  Maybe it makes sense if the whole device needs to be installed in an inaccessible place frequently and most people would be unlikely to take advantage of a wired connection. Or maybe their statistics of the common usage of the equipment actually support it. Or both, I don't know. In any case, since you're already being sold $2000 worth of equipment for the absurdly low price of $500, I'm not quite sure that a complaint about some adapter is in order.
  - zlsa 5y ago
    And it's worth noting the Ethernet adapter is only $20, and appears to be a power supply as well: https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rectangular.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rect... (page 8)
  - MangoCoffee 5y ago
    >In any case, since you're already being sold $2000 worth of equipment for the absurdly low price of $500, I'm not quite sure that a complaint about some adapter is in order. kinda agree. i remember watch or read a tear down on the original Starlink dish. it wasn't cheap to make but maybe Starlink should charge more for its dish instead?
ortusdux 5y ago
I am surprised that they didn't raise the 50°C max operating temp. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27526074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27526074 I wonder if this unit pulls 120-160 watts like the first gen.
chromaton 5y ago
A big complaint for the first dish was that the cable was hardwired in, which made snaking it through walls, etc. hard to do. I wonder if this updates that.
- jobe_br 5y ago
  Yea, it appears to address that, but the new cable doesn’t seem user replaceable/fixable and it doesn’t appear possible to extend it, as the original cable was (albeit with difficulty).
  - nbutyllithium 5y ago
    Unless I'm misunderstanding their online shop (which annoyingly requires a login to view) shows replacement cables of 75 foot or 150 foot length (for $60 and $85 respectively). The gen 1 dish had a 100 foot cable that wasn't made to be (easily) user replaceable. The ends look like a proprietary connection with a waterproof uh... double o-ring? I'm sure there's a better word for it and I'm blanking on it. (https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkCable_1100x620.png https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkCable_1100x620...)
    - reportingsjr 5y ago
      The word you are looking for is gasket. :)
- joshuamoes 5y ago
  Looks like it was addressed with different lengths being available, however looks like a proprietary connector. https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rectangular.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rect...
- olyjohn 5y ago
  Yeah I have the first gen dish, and about 60 feet of network cable from the dish spooled up in a closet. It's not very tidy and sort of a pain to deal with. I could probably cut it down and put a new end on it, but I worry that shortening the cable will screw it up, or it'll screw up the PoE since it's not really 100% standard PoE (so I've read) to the dish due to the higher power draw.
sxates 5y ago
Has anyone found info on power consumption? Still 100+ W?
kingcharles 5y ago
I'm in downtown Chicago and I can't get wired Internet from anyone. I was looking at Starlink, but T-Mobile had a better price - free equipment and $50/month for 200Mbps download.
- cozzyd 5y ago
  Where are you? My condo building in the loop has several choices of providers, including a a gigabit ethernet port from Google Webpass. (which is apparently serviced via point-point microwave link on top of our building) Either way Starlink won't be very useful with too high a user density (just basic bandwidth math), so it's not a good fit for urban areas. 5G/LTE (which you are using) is a much better option since there are cell antennas like every block.
- olyjohn 5y ago
  What's the data cap on that?
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    No cap. Lowest priority on the tower.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ncmncm 5y ago
If they were to put a few GB of memory on these terminal dish things, and (say) a few PB on each satellite, they could have satellites broadcast a cache of what a lot of people in the service area are watching, saving a lot of up-and-down traffic. Broadcast, so all the terminals are listening to identically the same packets arriving. The flagship use for such a capability would be for World Cup games, where not much actual storage would be involved, because almost everybody is interested only in the latest few seconds of the game. It looks like launches of Starlink satellites are volume-limited, not mass-limited, so adding a few kg to each for the PB or so of SSDs would be cheap (albeit x17k for that many satellites). But they are going to be bandwidth-limited pretty soon, and eliminating a whole bunch of high-traffic up-and-down streams will be worth a lot. I think right now the on-board lasers in the last one (or two?) launches just point to the satellite immediately in front and behind in the same orbit. (Please correct me if I am mistaken.) Probably soon they will have extra lasers on board that can track satellites in other orbits, with galvanomically controlled mirrors, to be able to route traffic and, usefully, share content of on-board SSDs, multiplying the available cache capability by splitting it among subsets of the satellites. Of course it will need app-level adaptations to be able to take advantage of this sort of caching, but it needn't be complex, mostly like a redirect to a proxy running in the dish. Strictly speaking, RAM on the dish hardware is not strictly necessary, given custom software running in the clients, but everything gets a lot easier if the client software is maximally simple.
- morei 5y ago
  This is much harder than you're assuming. With the increasing prevalence of TLS traffic (https et al), any cache almost certainly needs to be an explicitly configured proxy which is a user configuration issue with all it's associated support and compatibility problems. Add to that the power consumption on a satellite is often a limiting factor, the security issues, the added latency, the ever decreasing fraction of traffic that is cache-able, etc etc ... it's very much not clear that this is a good idea.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I see that you replied before reading the final paragraph. Whatever is the power consumption of broadcasting to all receivers in the cell, it is much, much less than transmitting the same data to each of the receivers individually, and less again than receiving it over and over again from the fiber terminal, even if you have to power up an SSD for it.

68 points by drewrem11 5y ago

I talked to a guy yesterday who was looking forward to Starlink GA so he could get reliable uplink from an arduino sensor array on a boat used to service aquaculture farms in the middle of the ocean. I'm pretty optimistic about how much of the world this is going to connect.

dienfosbei 5y ago
That makes little sense to me. Satellite links have been around for ages. They are totally fine for an application like that where latency is no issue.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Not enough bandwidth, and it wasn't stable.
- reportingsjr 5y ago
  Maybe said person is pushing many megabytes/month of data and not thrilled about data pricing from iridium or whatever other company. Or maybe they want to switch and support competition to decrease prices? It's kind of an odd choice unless significant power/energy is available. An iridium modem + Arduino doesn't need all that much power, but the starlink phased array antenna does.

wetpaws 5y ago

Almost 2x reduction in weight is very impressive.

yurishimo 5y ago
I wonder if they needed more powerful hardware in v1 due to a lower number of available satellites? Fewer satellites means potentially a further distance to beam the signal to. Now that SpaceX has had a while to roll out more sats, they can use less powerful radios that need less heat dissipation and thus save weight. Pure speculation on my part as I am not a hardware person, but I'd be interested to know!
nybble41 5y ago
Indeed, if they'd reduced the weight by 2x the original weight then they would have succeeded in inventing anti-gravity. The 0.425x (or 42.5%) reduction in weight described in the article is not quite that impressive, but is still quite a respectable achievement.

curtis3389 5y ago

But what is its name?! Dishy McFlatface Jr?

joshuamoes 5y ago
Unfortunately it looks like it is being called Rectangular Dishy McSquare face? https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkInstallGuide_Rectangular.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkInstallGuide_R...

savant_penguin 5y ago

"However, one drawback to the second-gen dish is the lack of a built-in Ethernet port, which can be found on the original Starlink dish. Instead, the company is selling an Ethernet adaptor for the dish via the Starlink online shop. " Did they just pull an apple here?

stefan_ 5y ago
It's worse than that. "To connect a 3rd party router or mesh system, you will need to purchase the Ethernet Adapter from the Starlink Shop to allow for a wired connection to the network. Bypass functionality is coming soon, and we are actively working on development of a Starlink mesh product." Previously, you could just throw out their shitty falling over WiFi thing to connect what you want. Now it's a dongle.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jhgb 5y ago
Maybe it makes sense if the whole device needs to be installed in an inaccessible place frequently and most people would be unlikely to take advantage of a wired connection. Or maybe their statistics of the common usage of the equipment actually support it. Or both, I don't know. In any case, since you're already being sold $2000 worth of equipment for the absurdly low price of $500, I'm not quite sure that a complaint about some adapter is in order.
- zlsa 5y ago
  And it's worth noting the Ethernet adapter is only $20, and appears to be a power supply as well: https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rectangular.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rect... (page 8)
- MangoCoffee 5y ago
  >In any case, since you're already being sold $2000 worth of equipment for the absurdly low price of $500, I'm not quite sure that a complaint about some adapter is in order. kinda agree. i remember watch or read a tear down on the original Starlink dish. it wasn't cheap to make but maybe Starlink should charge more for its dish instead?

ortusdux 5y ago

I am surprised that they didn't raise the 50°C max operating temp. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27526074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27526074 I wonder if this unit pulls 120-160 watts like the first gen.

chromaton 5y ago

A big complaint for the first dish was that the cable was hardwired in, which made snaking it through walls, etc. hard to do. I wonder if this updates that.

jobe_br 5y ago
Yea, it appears to address that, but the new cable doesn’t seem user replaceable/fixable and it doesn’t appear possible to extend it, as the original cable was (albeit with difficulty).
- nbutyllithium 5y ago
  Unless I'm misunderstanding their online shop (which annoyingly requires a login to view) shows replacement cables of 75 foot or 150 foot length (for $60 and $85 respectively). The gen 1 dish had a 100 foot cable that wasn't made to be (easily) user replaceable. The ends look like a proprietary connection with a waterproof uh... double o-ring? I'm sure there's a better word for it and I'm blanking on it. (https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkCable_1100x620.png https://api.starlink.com/public-files/StarlinkCable_1100x620...)
  - reportingsjr 5y ago
    The word you are looking for is gasket. :)
joshuamoes 5y ago
Looks like it was addressed with different lengths being available, however looks like a proprietary connector. https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rectangular.pdf https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rect...
olyjohn 5y ago
Yeah I have the first gen dish, and about 60 feet of network cable from the dish spooled up in a closet. It's not very tidy and sort of a pain to deal with. I could probably cut it down and put a new end on it, but I worry that shortening the cable will screw it up, or it'll screw up the PoE since it's not really 100% standard PoE (so I've read) to the dish due to the higher power draw.

sxates 5y ago

Has anyone found info on power consumption? Still 100+ W?

kingcharles 5y ago

I'm in downtown Chicago and I can't get wired Internet from anyone. I was looking at Starlink, but T-Mobile had a better price - free equipment and $50/month for 200Mbps download.

cozzyd 5y ago
Where are you? My condo building in the loop has several choices of providers, including a a gigabit ethernet port from Google Webpass. (which is apparently serviced via point-point microwave link on top of our building) Either way Starlink won't be very useful with too high a user density (just basic bandwidth math), so it's not a good fit for urban areas. 5G/LTE (which you are using) is a much better option since there are cell antennas like every block.
olyjohn 5y ago
What's the data cap on that?
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  No cap. Lowest priority on the tower.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ncmncm 5y ago

If they were to put a few GB of memory on these terminal dish things, and (say) a few PB on each satellite, they could have satellites broadcast a cache of what a lot of people in the service area are watching, saving a lot of up-and-down traffic. Broadcast, so all the terminals are listening to identically the same packets arriving. The flagship use for such a capability would be for World Cup games, where not much actual storage would be involved, because almost everybody is interested only in the latest few seconds of the game. It looks like launches of Starlink satellites are volume-limited, not mass-limited, so adding a few kg to each for the PB or so of SSDs would be cheap (albeit x17k for that many satellites). But they are going to be bandwidth-limited pretty soon, and eliminating a whole bunch of high-traffic up-and-down streams will be worth a lot. I think right now the on-board lasers in the last one (or two?) launches just point to the satellite immediately in front and behind in the same orbit. (Please correct me if I am mistaken.) Probably soon they will have extra lasers on board that can track satellites in other orbits, with galvanomically controlled mirrors, to be able to route traffic and, usefully, share content of on-board SSDs, multiplying the available cache capability by splitting it among subsets of the satellites. Of course it will need app-level adaptations to be able to take advantage of this sort of caching, but it needn't be complex, mostly like a redirect to a proxy running in the dish. Strictly speaking, RAM on the dish hardware is not strictly necessary, given custom software running in the clients, but everything gets a lot easier if the client software is maximally simple.

morei 5y ago
This is much harder than you're assuming. With the increasing prevalence of TLS traffic (https et al), any cache almost certainly needs to be an explicitly configured proxy which is a user configuration issue with all it's associated support and compatibility problems. Add to that the power consumption on a satellite is often a limiting factor, the security issues, the added latency, the ever decreasing fraction of traffic that is cache-able, etc etc ... it's very much not clear that this is a good idea.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I see that you replied before reading the final paragraph. Whatever is the power consumption of broadcasting to all receivers in the cell, it is much, much less than transmitting the same data to each of the receivers individually, and less again than receiving it over and over again from the fiber terminal, even if you have to power up an SSD for it.