Starlink Ground Station Map | Hacker News Reader

Starlink Ground Station Map

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Those stations in Chile are going to revolutionise comms down there.

I trekked to El Chalten in 2019 and the entire town was connected with a ~150mb microwave link. With thousands of tourists in town it had slowed to a crawl. Starlink won’t do much in cities but for regional areas it will open massive opportunities particularly in tourism with today’s instagramming travellers.

El Chalten is in Argentina and its a completely different story over there.

Chile has fiber all the way to the very south and is in the process of further expanding this network to all relevant cities in the south until the end of next year.

https://foa.subtel.gob.cl/mapa-de-proyecto-foa/

I am well aware El Chalten is in Argentina, hopefully there's not a requirement to have a national base station to serve a particular country. The Patagonian location should be able to cover both Argentina and Chile effectively.

Interesting to see Chile's new Fibre network taking shape. I guess it was a factor in the placement decision for these base stations though I imagine they were also located in Chile for the higher wealth and economic stability compared to Argentina.

Well, there's no ground station in Portugal but starlink already announced availability of the service in Portugal.

Unrelated: how should one go about to become a certified starlink installer, anyone knows?

Europe might be considered the same geography regulations wise.

Strict regimes would want connections termination locally so they can monitor and implement content blocks/censorships etc. It would not be possible if the ground stations where not in the geographical control.

Depends actually,some countries want to monitor their inbound/outbound traffic so it might be restricted in that way in geographies requiring this, they can hardly add monitoring equipment in another country after all.

If this is going to work from my boat at some point, I'm never setting foot on land ever, again.

Until you need to shop for groceries and boat repair supplies, of course.

You just order those through Boatmates.

Delivered by gen-a's via fpv drone

>groceries

Ever heard of fish?

>boat repair

Ever heard of the fish people?

> Ever heard of the fish people?

Mermaid?

I was thinking more "The Shape of Water".

One of my sailing channels I follow YouTube once said - it's not really cruising channel, it's a bluewater boat maintenance channel. Those episodes are always the most interesting!

Unfortunately (at present) Starlink does not provide for mobile platform access. They say you have to stay within your access cell and people have reported inability to connect if the antenna is taken somewhere distant from the registered home position. Maybe that will change in the future though?

That’s true, but only for capacity planning reasons during the beta.

They’re working on demonstrating flight use on a Air Force plane.

They’ve filed for FCC approval for mobile tests.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/8/22319761/spacex-starlink-f...

Elon’s tweeted about it

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1369051431903268865?s=21

There have already been USAF flight tests of starlink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_user_tests

There are two approaches to mobile users. Either you have a beam from the satellite directly track a moving user, or you have many fixed beams from the satellite and the user has to jump from one to the next as they move.

The first method was definitely used to begin with, but it doesn't scale - the satellite only has a certain number of beams available, so past a certain number of moving users it becomes necessary to use the 2nd system, which requires a very different software setup.

Eventually a hybrid system might be used, allocating per-user beams to the highest bandwidth users at the time. Per user beams can be far narrower and therefore get better SNR and more data throughput.

Moving users do not make a difference as the relative speed between satellites and users are dominated by the speed of the satellites which is kilometers per second vs. kilometers per hour for a moving user.

The Starlink dishes and satellites are using phased array antennas by the way which can steer the beam extraordinarily fast without having to physically move the antenna at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

> can steer the beam extraordinarily fast

The beam steering takes about 10 milliseconds. That means effectively the beam can't be steered at all during use (imagine you steer the beam to one user, send a few packets to them, then steer the beam to another user, send a few packets to them, and repeat - thats a 20 millisecond jitter the users incur - completely unacceptable).

That forces the beams to remained trained on a single user or area (covering a group of users).

You just need an array of beams (16x, etc) and do a rolling cross fade to mix the position between multiple beams.

That's okay. He didn't say he'd actually want to go somewhere. House boats are a thing...

I believe musky said mobile would be active by end of year?

OneWeb is coming to boats this year, even before it has global coverage. One thing to note with OneWeb is there are two terminals that must be placed more than 10' apart. e.g. ideal to put one on each hull of a cat, might be a bit tricky finding somewhere to put them on a 35' mono-hull.

So far it looks like OneWeb is going to be a better option for marine use because you can actually find information about it within the industry already. With Starlink all we have to go on is speculation and the occasional tweet.

Does anyone have an image of what one of these ground stations looks like? Do they piggyback on some existing antenna shack? Or did they build their own from scratch?

I also wonder whether they considered partnering with AWS Ground Station? https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

Or maybe the Starlink constellation's requirements are not amenable to that?

Amazon is also planning an LEO internet constellation; being dependent upon a direct competitor for core infrastructure probably isn't a good idea, especially when that specific competitor (Amazon) has been busted before abusing its position as vendor to appropriate their customers' private information and enter their markets directly as participant.

If you are going to compete with Amazon, don't use AWS to do it.

I also doubt AWS ground station locations are numerous enough to provide the kind of service that Starlink needs.

Ah, that is a good point, of course.

What kind of ground station density does Starlink need in its eventual state?

The ground stations I saw on the map had 2.1GHz of uplink and 1.3GHz of downlink. If we assume 4b/hz (about as efficient as LTE/WiFi), thats 8.2Gbps up and 5.2Gbps down. I'm not too sure to what extent they can use MIMO techniques, but if they can, throughput could be multiplied by the number of MIMO channels.

I don't think you'd have much benefit of MIMO on a connection that's line of sight like this. MIMO is all about making the most of separate connection paths through reflections from walls, buildings etc. But in this case there'll be only one path.

Not necessarily: you could connect to several satellites and multiply your bandwidth that way.

Good point, once they have enough that could work.

There are photos here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/m8maa9/wise_nc_st...

Across all the photos I've seen it looks pretty consistent, they build a fence and mount the antennas on small pads. It doesn't look like Starlink is building their own shelters (the ones in those photos are the carrier's). The carriers will readily offer rack space in their shelters for the right price but this does tend to suggest that the antennas are pretty self-contained and don't require a lot of external support equipment.

Those pads look like the brackets are there for for forks to move them around?

I am curious what the power consumption and bandwidth are for each of those units.

These were posted by a user on Reddit

https://m.imgur.com/a/DkfdjbU

Basically a gravel lot fenced in with a bunch of radomes mounted to what look like prefab concrete pads.

Currently AWS Ground consists of a very small set of sites and antennas, not enough for any constellation. It's also very limited in terms if services.

> also wonder whether they considered partnering with AWS Ground Station? https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

Absolutely not since kuiper will be a direct competitor, and starlink's earth station design is their own proprietary equipment.

The majority of them are colocated with long haul DWDM regen huts, where they buy transport to the nearest major city. In the western US states they're adjacent to either Zayo or lumen (CenturyLink) sites.

SpaceX's original plan was to build environmentally controlled pods/huts to hold equipment to aggregate ground transceivers. However they found it more economical to build un-airconditioned pods/huts and use someone's extended-temperature equipment instead.

Source: my employer is that someone.

What about huge layers of Schnow?

Or do they only use this method in areas where it's not schnowing?

On a tangent, I wonder what effects Starlink will have in countries where the government wants to control or filter/restrict people's internet access?

I wondered this too, but came to the realization that it will be like any other ISP, and comply with any/all local laws it has to comply with to get the revenue that it is ultimately a company's job to get.

Most companies don't engage in activism/disobedience at the expense of revenue. Apple censors the App Store and backdoors iCloud for the CCP (via state-operated servers) to operate in mainland China, for example.

The ground stations will have to be fairly close to the customers for a while, and the customer antennas aren't particularly covert.

It will probably have all manner of government-mandated filtering like any other established commercial ISP. After all, it's nothing without its ground stations right now.

EDIT: It was HN that changed my view on this, in some of the comments in the HN thread on my Starlink blog post. I started out hopeful and idealistic about Starlink being an anti-censorship technology.

I am sure it is going to be prohibited to use it over there. I feel like I already read somewhere that government in Russia is concern about it.

"Russia may fine citizens for using SpaceX's Starlink internet. Here's how the internet service poses a threat to authoritarian regimes."

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-may-fine-citizens-spa...

For other sat phones and sat internet, if a country makes it illegal, the sat carriers don't provide service when you're in that country.

What happens if you are in a border area and one country its legal and one country its illegal?

Use decades old techniques to identify your exact location and lock you out? Only interesting question is which side the company picks when the border is disputed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Death_and_leg...

This kind of technique has also been targeted at others in the Middle East.

The country that's banned your service has exhausted almost all its leverage.

As long as you make a moderate effort, so they don't feel inclined to jam your service or shoot down your satellites, who cares if the signal bleeds over the border by a few km? Not like they're going to make you double-illegal.

There are already a handful of countries that restrict the import of things like sat phones, CB radios, etc.

The Starlink dish will just be on that same list of prohibited goods, and Customs will stop them coming into the country.

(I was warned NOT to take a sat phone on my trek all the way around Africa - governments of countries like Rep. Congo, Sudan, Nigeria and a few others don't like civilians (especially foreigners) having that tech)

I was in Kenya in the 90s. The government there were OK with you having two-way radio equipment, just as long as you compensated the national telephone carrier for their loss of business. I believe the cost was quite astronomical. Oh, and certain frequency bands were banned.

I know Cuba strictly controls which antennas can be imported into the country. I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected, even if Starlink supported it.

> I think it would be pretty hard to sneak a Starlink device in undetected,

I am sure people who smuggle drugs will find a way.

Realistically Starlink will register as an ISP in the country and follow government rules for censorship like all the rest.

A starlink terminal needs to transmit in known bands and have clear unobstructed view of the sky, and looks quite distinctive. Authoritarian states like Iran are totally capable of training cops to use portable spectrum analyzers, which are not nearly as big or costly as they used to be.

I'm not saying it's an impossible problem to solve, but will require some real time and effort.

Very little without the US government giving them the nod to provide these services (which is very unlikely). You could just about start World War 3.

Wow.

For a service that should have global reach, these are mostly in the US! I'm a lot more excited about LEO broadband compared to 5G. Sounds like a career change worth pursuing, even if you are halfway around the world.

There is no direct connectivity between the satellites at this point, so starlink can't be expected to have global reach yet - you go up, and you come down within a certain distance of where you are.

They will need ground stations all over the earth soon.

So currently all the internet for Starlink customers are from bouncing off Starlinks low-orbit satellites to these ground stations where they are connected via cable connected (normal internet) and served up, am I interpreting that correctly?

That's how I understand it, yes.

If double latency is okay, it may be possible to do M-shaped ones where an isolated ground station (with only power) relays solely between two different satellites to reach further, for example in the middle of oceans (with a ground station on an island or ship). I am not sure if they plan to implement this interim step or not, but it is technically possible.

Their eventual goal is to allow communication directly between the satellites (via laser is the plan, but who knows if that will reach production). It's in testing/R&D and is quite a difficult challenge.

> Their eventual goal is to allow communication directly between the satellites

I guess they'll have to though if they want to make it more scale-able? They satellites will always have to be up in space, but with communication between them they won't have to build ground stations everywhere. Plus ground stations themselves have to have good internet connectivity

Another huge potential market for Starlink will be internet links to ships at sea, or aircraft. When far from land there would be no ground station in range of the satellites overhead, and laser crosslink is the only way to make this work.

Or skip real time, and allow a store and forward setup for, imagine if you could send/receive a few MB of a few times an hour.

The satellites in polar orbits (so far only 10, but they are planning to launch several hundred more this year) do have laser crosslinks. They said all satellites launched next year will have laser crosslinks Source: https://spacenews.com/spacex-adds-laser-crosslinks-to-polar-...

> The satellites in polar orbits (so far only 10, but they are planning to launch several hundred more this year) do have laser crosslinks.

Yeah they've launched, but do they work? Teslas can be ordered with "autopilot" or "full self driving", too.

Nobody's ever done it before, and they've never said if it's working or not. I know they intend to do this, but it's important to draw a big fat line between what is planned to be accomplished and what is actually possible today. (To be clear, I am not casting doubt on their ability to accomplish it - the smartest people on Earth work for SpaceX. It's just not known publicly today if/when they will.)

Perhaps EM's best and most important skill is blurring the lines between today, tomorrow, next quarter, and next year as much as possible. Has someone named his Reality Distortion Field yet?

Us "Texas Tank Watchers" just refer to Elon Time. A lot of what Elon talks about comes to fruition, but you can might need quadruple the time he predicts.

They are working on satellite to satellite links: https://spacenews.com/spacex-adds-laser-crosslinks-to-polar-...

True but for best latency and speeds a direct link back to ground would be best. I think the laser links would be more for remote areas and oceans where downlinks are impossible.

> True but for best latency and speeds a direct link back to ground would be best.

Speed maybe, latency no. Light is faster in a vacuum than through a fiber optic cable, so a satellite-to-satellite path would generally be faster even though it has to go a few hundred km further.

True but in each satellite it has to be processed, integrity checked routed and queued to the next hop. That kind of stuff takes much longer than any differences in light speeds.

No it doesn't, and it's not like you don't need to route messages travelling terrestrially. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the technology knows that what you're saying is straight-up false.

The map legend points out that most of the data is from FCC filings, so other countries might not have complete data. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still more stations in the US than elsewhere, but this map probably isn’t the best evidence for that.

Likely it's easier for a US based company to get licensed and find sites to lease in the US. Also, better to get experience with equirment before going global.

Or, maybe it's just better transparency/goverment data on teleports from the US.

They're starting in the US but expanding to other countries now too. it won't be long before you will see these all over the world. It's already possible to pre-order starlink here in Spain for service around the end of this year.

Check out the starlink satellite orbits here: https://space-search.io/?search=starlink

Still a number of trains spreading out so global ground coverage is coming soon!

The 'legend' is not really a legend, (right?). It lists out base stations, but I still have no idea what the icons mean.

(Really cool project, btw. Thanks unidentified Googlers for creating it!)

the legend is in the atlantic ocean near the bermudes (click on the three round dots, + and two eyes)

Put down a deposit for service up in Alaska near Kenai. They're estimating early 2022 at the moment. Might be stuck on one of the GEO sat providers until then.

These are some very strange locations. Many of them are way out on country roads, some in places where I’m imagining they had to spent some money to get power service. Check out Panaca, NV, near the Utah border. I’ve been right through here and it’s super desolate. I’ve also been near the one in Evanston, WY and the one outside of Hutchinson, KS. There ain’t nothin’ out there!

What’s the reasoning for these locations? Low RF noise floor maybe? On some major transcon fiber route perhaps?

There's an ancient map here that shows a dogleg in the NV cable that may run by Panaca.

https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cyberge...

There is also an article that shows a few(?) cables in that area

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-detailed-pub...

If all you need is power and fiber, and you have to maintain the site indefinitely, it makes sense to go as cheap as possible I guess.

I imagine there are also some minor security benefits from being way out in the middle of nowhere.

I'm super glad for starlink in general as it allows me personally to just need power and water (and a clear view of the sky) and opens up a bunch of extremely cheap land options for viable places to build a house.

I bet the noise floor thing. Inmarsat (and the intelligence monitor station beside it) have been trying to block the 3.5Ghz spectrum in most of the Netherlands (up to 100km away or so).

They're now going to move somewhere else but it basically delayed the 5G rollout in the northern half of the country for years.

The majority of sites in the United States, actually all of them I've checked, are pre-existing fiber shelters, mostly CenturyLink's in the west. They exist at various points on the fiber line for add-drop and power injection. It's not especially unusual to negotiate with carriers to install equipment at these sites as part of your transit agreement. I don't immediately see any aerial photos where SpaceX's equipment seems to have been installed but I would imagine they're adding the antenna and maybe another prefab shelter. But basically everything you're seeing at those sites on Google Maps right now isn't Starlink, it's existing carrier equipment.

One thing to clarify there's no power injecting going on, unless you mean optically through things like Raman amps and EDFAs...

Long haul terrestrial fiber cables aren't like submarine fiber which has copper lines to carry high voltage power for submarine repeaters/amps. The power at each site is self contained, usually a fairly normal feed from local grid utility, backup generators (diesel or propane), and -48vdc rectifier + battery setups of normal Telco grade equipment.

Yeah I'm just wrong about that, my knowledge is mostly historical and it's hard for me to get out of the mindset of the L-carriers where amplifier interval was 2-10 miles. The amplifier interval on the fiber these days is long enough they just build one of these points each time instead of having line-powered amplifier vaults.

That said out west where I am it's very common for fiber routes to follow the L-carrier routes and reuse the formerly line-powered amplifier sites for add-drop, but I believe they've had the utility install conventional power everywhere they've done that.

DWDM regen huts on major inter city fiber paths are usually out in some real randomly weird locations. Like the one in Prosser, WA. They're sited wherever they can get cheap land with electricity and a road passable by a normal pickup truck or telecom work van, approximately every 80 km of fiber, plus or minus a bit.

It's a pity that those of us offering to host ground stations in areas where the nearest ground station is hundreds of kilometers away are ignored. I've tried to reach folks at Starlink with zero success thus far. That said, I wonder what the bottleneck is for setting up new ground stations.

Very nice! What do the orange circles mean?

They are roughly the area in which you can be connected to a satellite that is directly connecting to the ground station in the middle of it.

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