How Musk's Starlink Satellites Connect You to Streaming Video

The device on your roof (in future) called by Elon Musk “Dishy McFlatface” and the thousands of “StarLink” spacecraft swarming rapidly overhead in low Earth orbits must communicate with each other continuously to provide you with live TV, internet, or streaming video.

This is a harder job than having a small parabolic TV dish pointing fixedly at a TV broadcast satellite in Geosynchronous orbit that stays right there, fixed against the stars overhead. The StarLink antenna must continuously track one rapidly moving satellite as it rises over the horizon and speeds overhead and then slew back to find the next one. One might envision a 1950’s solution that would power two stepper motors to slew your old parabolic dish to track and follow each satellite of interest. This cannot, however, provide the tracking accuracy, speed or reliability needed. Not even close.

This video explains how it is done. However, you must think of watching it as simply an education about how advanced and amazing computer and antenna technology has become. They give that warning in the beginning. It is really an exercise for your brain. While beautifully done, it leaves you realizing you should have taken the basic courses in several areas of physics before tackling this PHisD specialty.

But …. It is well done and you sometimes get great pleasure out of sort of understanding a few things. I loved it.