I, for one, welcome our new Starlink overlords!

[freebeard]

I don't put much credence in a concept rendering, but if anyone can make it work, they probably work for Elon Musk.

Possibly similar to the way commerial satellite dishes were 20 feet across, while home antennas are two. But they are oriented to the satellite[s] while a phone is oriented to the user's head.

Mars needs satellites.

[Piotrsko]

Back in the day...... the temperature noise equivelant on the preamps was about freezing, nowadays it's about -30. Thats why you can have a 2ft dish mispointed and still watch tv. The wavelength is about 1cm for full wave and its circular polarity so you need a 1/2 cm dia loop somewhere on top of the phone that's kinda omnidirectional for a gain of 1. That's standard sattelite, Elons stuff is different since it using dipoles that looked to be oriented horizontally

[freebeard]

I would expect it's an application for fractal antennae. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_antenna

Such fractal antennas are also referred to as multilevel and space filling curves, but the key aspect lies in their repetition of a motif over two or more scale sizes,[1] or "iterations". For this reason, fractal antennas are very compact, multiband or wideband, and have useful applications in cellular telephone and microwave communications. A fractal antenna's response differs markedly from traditional antenna designs, in that it is capable of operating with good-to-excellent performance at many different frequencies simultaneously. Normally standard antennas have to be "cut" for the frequency for which they are to be used—and thus the standard antennas only work well at that frequency.

In addition the fractal nature of the antenna shrinks its size, without the use of any components, such as inductors or capacitors.

edit: It's sorta off topic, but one of my favorite things lately is this space telescope.

Why is this Space Telescope so Tiny?

A glass cylinder with two concentric bifocal lenses on each end and a tube drilled cavity for a baffle. The 300mm focal length is a hair less than a foot.

It's been hand-lapped by a guy in The Netherlands for a cubesat by Portland Sate University.

[redpoint5]

Of the skills I wish I had, RF guru is it.

Originally Posted by freebeard

Mars needs satellites.

Mars needs more satellites.

[Piotrsko]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Of the skills I wish I had, RF guru is it.

Probably are one, just on a very specific obscure subset.

Not sure the fractals work as a top mounted phone antenna, the wiki said the aperture was odd.

[redpoint5]

RF seems a bit like an art to me. Is the science so good that one can design a Tx/Rx apparatus and know with a high degree of precision various performance results given various use cases?

[freebeard]

It's a use case for Generative AI.

Have you followed Eric Dollard? He makes interesting assertions. The first hour is a history that Tesla barely figures in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6UwdtHq-v4

[Piotrsko]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

RF seems a bit like an art to me. Is the science so good that one can design a Tx/Rx apparatus and know with a high degree of precision various performance results given various use cases?

The science predicts results pretty adequately up to a GHZ, the differences are the atmospheric propagation You do realize that RF is above 1mhz? All your computer stuff is technically short range RF, you just need antennas and recievers

[Xist]

You get what you pay for. When I was in Afghanistan I paid $3,500 for a satellite Internet receiver. They gave me the wrong coordinates and I needed to move my setup several times before I could finally get a signal. I knew the latency would be atrocious, but the download speed was barely adequate for Tradewars 2002, and it was supposed to be fast enough for 8-10 personnel.

Towards the ends of my deployment they flew me to a base adjacent to our main base in Kandahar Airfield. They had a room of laptops hooked up to a tan mini receiver that automatically adjusted.

The lag was still bad, but it was high-speed.

It was marvelous!

Don't worry! I finally sold my equipment for $500!

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

You do realize that RF is above 1mhz? All your computer stuff is technically short range RF, you just need antennas and receivers.

No kidding.

How to Build a Raspberry Pi FM Radio Transmitter
https://circuitdigest.com › microcontroller-projects › raspberry-pi-fm-transmitter
So by writing a code to perform frequency modulation using the spread-spectrum clock signal we can tweak the Pi to work as a FM transmitter. The modulated signal will be given out through the GPIO pin 4 of the Raspberry Pi. We can simply attach a normal wire of 20 cm maximum to this pin to act as an antenna.

One might be able to 3D print fractal antennae, but my print only does 0.2mm resolution.