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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

I'm typing this message from Starlink. For me it's absolutely transformative; 10x the bandwidth I can get from any other source and very reliable.

Except for outages related to obstructions. That's a real problem and the author's situation is not good. There's ways to work around it on your property; a taller mount, a tree install, cutting some trees. But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it.

I have some smaller obstructions for my install and it was a little annoying but fine. But in the past week or two it's gotten way better: my packet loss went from 2% to 0.6%. Details here: https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/starlink-improve...

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huh. perhaps I'm exhibiting my total ignorance here, but why do they have to point North?

I know that our Satellite TV dish when I was a kid had to point to a specific angle southwards, to match the geostationary position, but I'd not expect that with Starlink, unless you were in the Falklands or Antarctica, or something?

It's a purposeful choice to avoid interfering with radio bandwidth allocations to existing geostationary satellites. As I understand it, Starlink dishes aren't allowed to send signals to a portion of the sky around the equator where the geostationary satellites are located.

Starlink would probably work even better if they didn't have to deal with this restriction, but Starlink might not have been allowed to exist if they didn't design it to work this way.

Huh. I had no idea, but makes a lot of sense, thinking about it.

Thanks!

First to clarify; Starlink points north in the northern hemisphere.

Your satellite TV dish is talking to something 36,000km up in geosynchronous orbit, around the equator. That's to the south of you.

Starlink are in 550km orbits moving very fast around the planet in a fairly inclined orbit. As another commenter has said, the apparent effect is the cluster tends to "hang out" in the north. It's complicated, a good visualization should help explain it. I don't have one at my fingertips.

Mm, i appreciate the basics there, but if you look at the spread of satellites against latitude (eg https://satellitemap.space/ ), it's pretty consistent so without any outside reason, I'd expect the Starlink dish to simply point up across most of the world, away from the poles.

coder543's answer elsewhere here seems to furnish the remainder of my confusion.

Maybe this picture helps? https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/s...

The radius at a northern latitude is smaller than at the equator, so the satellites are more tightly clustered.

I think coder543's answer is wrong, or at least has the causality backwards. Those geosync orbits are very, very far away from the LEO orbits of Starlink.

I'm assuming that at 550 miles up, the beneath-the-horizon range will be quite broad, but as equally, I'd assume further-off satellites to be slower and more conflicted, given the density and interference presumably increases.

I just don't see how - sans external requirement - pointing up isn't more efficient.

- ed. Ok, sorry, I get it. Aim in any direction and you have access to more satellites, even if further away. Pointing up isn't 180º access. Reception is probably less than 90º, I guess? My bad, I'm dumb.

It's OK, orbits are confusing. We all know in our hearts the earth is flat.

North is where all the satellites cluster as they reach the peak latitude of their orbit period: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/190208-s...

> But ultimately Dishy needs a clear view to the north and there's no getting around it.

I don't know much about radio or Starlink's signals, but is this a situation where a strategically-placed radio reflector would help? Assuming those are a thing. So like, a reflector mounted on both sides of a large tree. Are the signal beams too narrow for this to matter?

The signal needs to be carefully aimed, so unless you get software that is able to take the reflector into account, it's just making things worse.

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