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0 pointsjpgvm3y ago0 comments

Iridium was a marvel of engineering no-doubt but Starlink as a constellation is in a different league entirely.

They also followed different engineering principles, Iridium was engineered to perfection while Starlink is hacked until it works and paper over the kinks with sheer scale and many iterations.

Worth mentioning I have nothing but admiration for the original Iridium constellation, it was decades ahead of it's time, it's just so unfortunate they didn't see that broadband needs were going to dominate communications in time or maybe Motorola in it's original glory would still be around today.

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walrus013y ago

big difference also is that iridium was designed from the outset to address handheld size customer terminals like an original iridum 9505 phone, starlink is something that needs a considerably larger fixed phased array. rf laws of physics being what they are I don't see a ku/ka-band starlink handheld phone or anything similar to the iridium L/S-band hockey puck sized antennas any time soon.

the business model was clearly not the best, as witnessed by its spectacular bankruptcy, and the acquisition by the 2nd corporate incarnation of iridium.

Robotbeat3y ago

Starlink has plenty of room for increasing their antenna size on the satellite size to something that a handheld could use. I was surprised how small the phased array on the sat side is. Increase that to make it similar to the size of the satellite (not counting solar array) and with the larger v2 satellites, and they'd have much more gain (allowing the handheld antenna to be smaller). They essentially already use 5G bandwidth.

It'd only work well outside, though.

lxgr3y ago

Isn‘t part of what allows much hire bandwidths for Starlink due to spatial frequency reuse, which requires mandatory beamforming on both sides of the connection?

There are many satellites overhead at any given time (the current LEOs and MEOs usually have just one), so terminals need to be able to limit their gain to a small angle not only for gain reasons. Steering in handheld applications seems very difficult.

Of course, they could dedicate parts of their spectrum to "one sided beamforming" and compete with Iridium that way (no idea if the L-band has any other advantages over Ka when used like that).

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