[ianburrell]

It works with any phone with LTE.

It requires larger antennas. Starlink had to launch the V2 satellites which are larger and have new, big antenna for Direct-to-cell. They were meant for Starship, but that was delayed so they developed V2 Mini for Falcon 9. The version with antenna started launching beginning of year. My understanding is that are close to numbers for providing global coverage.

[stavros]

That's amazing, I'm having trouble believing that a mobile phone's antenna can talk to space, 500km away. Do you know what sort of bandwidth these will have?

[ianburrell]

The bandwidth will be small. I saw 2-5 Mbps for the whole cell covering a city. Devices will be limited to messages, small amounts of data, and voice.

[stavros]

That's still the difference between lost in the mountains and "my coordinates are X, Y".

[comboy]

But it's still a mobile phone transmission power (1W?) and then r^2. Distinguishing that from noise seems mind-boggling.

[dzhiurgis]

Really just makes one think what sort of capability military has.

[JaimeThompson]

Check out the Orion series of Sigint birds[1]

" The satellites have estimated mass close to 5,200 kg and very large (estimated 100 m diameter) radio reflecting dishes."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)

[RoddaWallPro]

But just to clarify, because I'm also having a hard time imagining this, an LTE antenna in a cell phone can beam data to a satellite and have it picked up? Even at whatever low kbps? That is insane to me!

[wmf]

Yes. It's been demonstrated a few times.

[lxgr]

There are IoT devices that can talk to geostationary satellites, and these are roughly 100 times further up (36000 km vs. 300-1000 for LEO)!

I have one that’s significantly smaller and lighter than a smartphone, antenna and all.

These satellites partially make up for the distance by deploying huge antennas, sometimes augmented by large reflector meshes that can only unfold in space.

[stavros]

Yeah, that's pretty crazy, I guess that's what GPS receivers do, in the end (though at pretty low bandwidths).

[dotnet00]

As far as I'm aware, the V2 minis are different from the DTC sats. V2 mini just has expanded network bandwidth. DTC are a specific variant of the V2 mini with the hardware needed for DTC. Not all V2 launches, even now, are DTC variants.

[asadotzler]

Correct. A small fraction are DTC capable, often times only a couple per launch but increasing of late. Still a small minority of each launch stack.

[wkat4242]

Yeah and only a few of each launch are direct to cell capable. Probably until starship works.