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Comment by alextheparrot | Hacker News Reader

My mother was raving about the service the other day.

Speeds are 10-15x faster, she’s having an easier time with her online community college course and her job KPI is up by double digit percents [1]. She was worried that IT wouldn’t be OK with it when I said it was satellite (They’d been burned too many times), but the IT guy was incredibly excited because he’s also waiting to get Starlink.

Looking forward to the service only getting better, really incredible execution.

[0] My dad went on the roof in the cold Wisconsin winter to put it up.

[1] Lines transcribed per hour, as a medical transcriptionist working from home.

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> Unfortunately it's also littering the sky with a shitload of eventual junk, and immediate astronomical blight.

Starlink are the least likely satellites to create "eventual junk" since they orbit so low. The biggest criticism is probably that there are so many they present a visual hazard for astronomy

Did you respond to the wrong comment?

Any issues with snow etc?

I was thinking it might generate enough heat to keep it warm. But the comments in this thread appear to think it has a heater inside of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JSq6xB591M

I wouldn't be surprised that the Starlink dish can melt snow. It's literally an antenna that shoots high energy microwaves into space over many hours.

100W of microwaves according to another comment here. By contrast your microwave oven might emitting 800W for a few minutes.

Unlike the few watts of a Wifi router or phone, it emits high power electromagnetic radiation.

It's definitely something you attach to your roof and pointed at the sky, not something you want to be sitting in front of for hours.

> It's definitely something you attach to your roof and pointed at the sky, not something you want to be sitting in front of for hours.

I could say the same thing about a light bulb, couldn't I?

It heats your skin slowly, and it can't get far enough into your eyes to hurt your retina or anything.

Lightbulbs are visible light and infrared. It heats the surface of your skin.

Microwaves penetrate your skin and even your skull. It's heating your brain like cooking food in a microwave. Yes, it's non-ionizing, but there's a relationship between heating, inflammation and cancer. And it's wrong to ignore it.

Just take simple precautions like not sitting right in front of a 100W space antenna, but instead mount it on your roof.

Starlink terminal transmissions are 14+GHz. It all converts to heat within a millimeter or two. It can't heat your brain. (And even if it could, "like cooking food" is a bad way to describe the fraction of a degree you'd get.)

Also the actual signal from that antenna is 20 watts or less. If it heats you, that's going to be because it's warm.

That's for the schooling me with Cunningham's Law with the fact the frequency wasn't ~2.4GHz, and the signal power was way less than 100 watts.

Thanks*

There's absolutely no heater inside it, as this great disassembly/destruction shows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo

Depends on your definition of a heater, certainly there's no separate heating module but here's[0] a SpaceX team member saying it has 'self heating capabilities' in their reddit ama.

[0]-https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the...

700+ chip count makes some heat.

Dishy will actually intentionally heat up to melt snow. I’ve seen YouTube videos of it melting a good amount of snow per hour and service remaining stable.

Dishy also seems to continually pull 100 watts even when not in melt mode.

That’s some large continuous power consumption for off grid use. Curious if they’ll come up with a way to put it into some sort of low power idle mode during low utilization?

Yeah https://conversation.sevarg.net/t/starlink-satellite-based-i... talks about it - 100 watts idle is too high if you’re on battery.

It’s noticeably high so I assume at some point it’ll be reduced unless it’s caused by continuous “transmission” so the satellite doesn’t lose the connection.

Depends what sort of battery you're on. The cheapest car Tesla sells (or at least that is displayed to me when I visit their site), for example, has a 54 kwh battery. It could run a 100 watt load for ~22 days between charges (not counting driving). Or to put it another way, if you charge every day, and you never turn the dish off, this would only drain 1/22nd of your range.

Tesla batteries are sweet, but ~22 days isn’t long enough if you’re off grid full time. I am trying to keep power generation 100% solar rather than burn diesel/gas to charge batteries when I can. So 2.4kwh per day might require roughly 500 watts of additional solar panels in a sunny locale. More solar could be added, but there are some space and weight limitations on a vehicle. I’m at 1400 watts of solar now.

Anyhow, just hoping they can figure out how to get the average power draw down over time.

> Tesla batteries are sweet, but ~22 days isn’t long enough if you’re off grid full time.

If you start running low you can stop letting it idle.

> More solar could be added, but there are some space and weight limitations on a vehicle.

It can be a problem if you're off-grid and moving around, yeah.

For general off-grid use it's annoying but not a big deal to set up an extra panel or two.

Elon has said more than once reducing the power needs is a goal. (so it can be more easily used on small boats, RVs, etc.)

None that she has mentioned, though I don't think they’ve had any really really bad storms this year.

Zero issues from my experience. The dish has a snow melt "mode", and I didn't have to manually clean it at all after a large snowfall.

I am excited to receive my base station shortly.

Faster than? Also, does anyone know who's behind this effort? Other leaders would celebrate the people behind the development but at spacex and tesla it's only ever news about Musk?

Any interesting people behind what is happening at SpaceX ?

Couldn't find names but the employees did an AMA on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the...

> Couldn't find names

That's kinda sad, isn't it?

Per this article Mark Juncosa has lead the development of the satellites

https://qz.com/1627570/how-autonomous-are-spacexs-starlink-s...

From what I see he's been working at SpaceX since he graduated college. I don't see where his satcom knowledge comes from, which is arguable the most interesting part of Starlink. Not the vehicle design.

It's really unfortunate that this company unlike most companies treats all the brain drain as an ego trip.

Musk never claims credit for the work of his team. The burden of proof is on you.

That said, I recall he has not only explicitly credited lead engineers by name but also discussed their technologies with them and given them stage time to discuss their tech with the audience. [see the automation day videos for example]

I haven't heard anything about NDAs that prevent you talking about the general area of your work at any of Musk's companies. There are certainly people on LinkedIn talking about what they do.

Look at any FAANG presentation. The VP of the department introduces a PM, who may have a senior engineer with them. The other 98% of the team isn't mentioned.

> That's kinda sad, isn't it?

Why don't you start a thread about it. Poll workers and see if they find themselves upset by it or not. Don't just borrow offense on their behalf.

I feel like there are also some jobs is rather not be too public about. I got customers finding me and trying to reach out directly in much more mundane scenarios. If I worked at SpaceX in an engineering role, I think I'd be keeping it pretty private (not secret).

It appears to be faster than rural Wisconsin internet service.

someone I know (coincidentally in wisconsin) is getting 100m down 20m up

There's always (the other) Linus: https://youtu.be/Fh1a2K9ZgNA

I'm in Wisconsin, just got it, and am seeing 65-115 down, 15-40 up. I was hoping it would be better than Hughesnet, but I didn't expect it would be quite this good. I did have about a five minute downtime yesterday. Not too shabby!

What's your latency like?

I'm in exurban Wisconsin. Speeds are fine, but Charter has terrible routing that pushes everything out to Minnesota before routing back down to Chicago. 40ms to 60ms latency on EVERYTHING.

It's varied from as low as 30ms up to almost 80. Latency is just not going to be great with satellites, seeing that we're pushing it out to fricking space.

Except it’s low space. And signals travel faster in air than in glass. And the path is likely more direct.

Just space alone isn’t enough to say the latency will be worse.

yes, just 341 miles.

so 3.6 milliseconds raw speed-of-light round trip when overhead.

I don't know what it would be like as it reaches the horizon, and how much latency each hop takes.

You might be interested in https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY, for some (long) routes it can theoretically be faster.

Yeah, they were getting 8 down 3 up in a rural area via a locally run ISP. Starlink is insanely disruptive in that market.

This was compared to a local run ISP that they connect to via a local tower (Farm silo). The ISP licenses spectrum from Verizon iirc.

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