Starlink Onboard Terminals - Ukrainian Engineering Experience

Recommendations for Manufacturers, Developers, and Customers. What Should Be Improved Now? Overheating, Vibration, Shaking, Maneuvering, Power, and More…

Starlink satellite terminals are a high-tech system that is actively used in many mobile solutions, including all types of drones (UAV, USV, UGV). Maintaining stable communication while moving is quite a challenging task. Starlink developers not only incorporated the relevant functionality into their system during the development stage. They actually performed a gigantic amount of engineering work. But their high-tech result still has certain features and limitations.

Developers and manufacturers of equipment designed to use satellite communication while moving (primarily for drones) must take into account certain features discussed in this article. All recommendations provided here are equally useful for onboard Starlink systems, and for OneWeb, Amazon LEO (ex Kuiper), and other LEO or GEO satellite terminals.

The issues of using Starlink satellite terminals in this way were already discussed in one of the previous publications. In this material, we will focus on more technical, and even mechanical engineering specifics. We will also provide recommendations here for both developers and manufacturers, as well as customers and consumers of such solutions.

This article does not include sensitive and non-public aspects of using mobile satellite terminals in wartime conditions. The material contains engineering analysis and operates exclusively with publicly available data and author’s assessments and analytical conclusions.

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• Starlink - Briefly About the Most Important Things

• Overheating

• Vibrations

• Rolling, Impulse Accelerations, and Maneuvering

• Internal and External Electromagnetic Interference

• Power Supply

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