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According to https://direct.starlink.com/ https://direct.starlink.com/ they are unmodified phones. I guess that the battery drain will be huge. I don't know how
by pmontra 3y ago
According to https://direct.starlink.com/ https://direct.starlink.com/ they are unmodified phones. I guess that the battery drain will be huge. I don't know how low those satellites will fly but the satellite to phone distance should be in the hundreds of km, not single digit km at most like we usually do.
- Podgajski 3y agoSo that this makes me think well, how strong and how much power is in the downlink and is that too much EMF exposure?
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWait until you find out how much exposure you get by being outside in the sunlight surrounded by cell phone towers.
- pmontra 3y agoCommunication is bidirectional so there is no need for the downlink to be more powerful than the uplink: the phone must be able to send data to the satellite using its own antenna and battery. However in theory a more powerful downlink could send data down to the phone faster than the phone sends it up to the satellite.
- lxgr 3y agoA really powerful satellite has a power supply of about 1 kilowatt. Assuming perfectly efficient antennas and a single spot beam with a diameter of about 300 kilometers (realistically, it's going to project dozens of these for a total of several thousand kilometers, but let's stick with the worst case here), that's an area of about 200 000 square kilometers to cover with that one kilowatt, i.e. 5 milliwatt per square kilometer. This is roughly the same amount of maximum EM radiation emitted by a single AirPod – now spread that over one square kilometer. Compare that with a regular LTE or 5G cell with a cell radius of at absolute best 30 kilometers (but often much, much less, e.g. 1 kilometer) and an unusually high EIRP of 50 watt, and you get 17 milliwatt per square kilometer. Or take an AM radio station: These transmit with 50 kilowatt and are much closer to people, sometimes located on rooftops in densely populated cities. Realistically, what arrives down on earth is probably still a few orders of magnitude less than that and just at the edge of the noise threshhold for the phone. It's not exactly a beam weapon.