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The closing statement in the article was unexpected "With nearly five billion Bluetooth devices sold annually, the impact of this breakthrough could be huge".

The closing statement in the article was unexpected "With nearly five billion Bluetooth devices sold annually, the impact of this breakthrough could be huge". It's one thing to use 2.4GHz spectrum in orbit between two satellites where there probably isn't much interference. That's interesting/cool. It's another thing to imply a BT consumer device on earth can connect to a satellite which seems like grossly misleading claim.

Rygian 2y ago
The title I see right now is "connects to two satellites in orbit from Earth" (as opposed to "between each other" I guess). "Hubble’s approach directly tackles these problems by enabling standard Bluetooth devices to connect to their satellite network without cellular reception simply with a software update" towards the middle of the article.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  The signal to noise ratio can't possibly support this, can it? Phone bluetooth transmitters are counted in milliwatts.
mafuyu 2y ago
Yeah, when this press release was making the rounds a few days ago, I tried to dig up more info, and didn’t find much. It seems like they’re aiming to connect terrestrial BT devices to satellites? I just don’t see how it could work. Maybe the actual tech they’re shooting for is to wrap the BT protocol or modulate it up to blast at satellites? Then you could enable connectivity for existing BT sensor networks and such. They explicitly say that it doesn’t require a hardware retrofit, only firmware, though. I suppose you could hit some sort of harmonic on a 2.4GHz antenna, but that would be very dependent on the frontend and antenna design, and the SNR would probably suck. Something doesn’t add up. Conceptually, I’m also not really sure if the pitch makes sense. Sure, let’s say you can do firmware patches to BT chipsets, but was that the expensive/hard part? Does the BT protocol and spec make sense in the context of hitting a satellite? It’s clearly not designed for it in terms of latencies, airtime, etc.

Rygian 2y ago

The title I see right now is "connects to two satellites in orbit from Earth" (as opposed to "between each other" I guess). "Hubble’s approach directly tackles these problems by enabling standard Bluetooth devices to connect to their satellite network without cellular reception simply with a software update" towards the middle of the article.

HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
The signal to noise ratio can't possibly support this, can it? Phone bluetooth transmitters are counted in milliwatts.

mafuyu 2y ago

Yeah, when this press release was making the rounds a few days ago, I tried to dig up more info, and didn’t find much. It seems like they’re aiming to connect terrestrial BT devices to satellites? I just don’t see how it could work. Maybe the actual tech they’re shooting for is to wrap the BT protocol or modulate it up to blast at satellites? Then you could enable connectivity for existing BT sensor networks and such. They explicitly say that it doesn’t require a hardware retrofit, only firmware, though. I suppose you could hit some sort of harmonic on a 2.4GHz antenna, but that would be very dependent on the frontend and antenna design, and the SNR would probably suck. Something doesn’t add up. Conceptually, I’m also not really sure if the pitch makes sense. Sure, let’s say you can do firmware patches to BT chipsets, but was that the expensive/hard part? Does the BT protocol and spec make sense in the context of hitting a satellite? It’s clearly not designed for it in terms of latencies, airtime, etc.