Ffmpeg can work with aalib

I'm tired of seeing the people who caused the 2008 financial crisis not going to prison, and things like the Mossack Fonseca leaked panama papers being a hot news item for maybe a few days and then disappearing.

That and a bgan terminal data has pricing from multiple dollars per megabyte transferred.

If starlink continues to focus mostly on the 55 degree latitude market and below, it's been possible oneweb will be complete and usable before there's full coverage of polar orbit starlink. A oneweb terminal isn't meant for use by 1 consumer but could be used by a small to medium sized local wisp or fiber ISP to serve a remote northern town.

There are dedicated purpose infrared sensor missile launch warning sats owned and run by USA and Russia and China. In addition to other radar systems.

No but big ass luggable computers have used desktop PC parts back in the day, Google "Dolch lunchbox computer". If you wanted the absolute most cpu power in something like a portable workstation that would be transported from job site to job site you could probably do something with an expensive 170x170mm mini itx format board and a 140W tdp cpu.

as long as laptop motherboards have to conform to custom shapes and thermal exhaust designs in order to be small and light there will always be a certain proprietary nature to them.

it's not like there's a standard for laptop motherboards similar to the 12"x9.6" ATX motherboard with ATX rear-IO-panel design we've been using for common midtower desktop PCs for the past 20 years.

it would be nice if somebody did standardize such a thing for a modular swappable laptop motherboard with all the i/o ports along the left side, the heatpipe and exhaust along the right side, or vice versa.

even something like a framework laptop has a totally bespoke custom size/shape/design to its cpu+gpu heatpipe and heatsink/blower fan assembly.

but I agree with you in principle.

Logically it's a bent pipe from the POV of an individual terminal, right now, even if they're doing layer-2-like MAC/PHY stuff on the satellite. But I agree with you they are clearly not just dumb repeaters the same way that a transponder on a geostationary satellite is. The make-before-break and handoff between satellites for single antenna phased array terminal that can talk to 2 satellites at once requires more intelligence than that.

The satellites certainly are not full featured routers such as the capability you'd find in a modern 1U height ISP carrier router with enough CPU/RAM/FIB/RIB for full BGP tables.

the motors in current model starlink terminals are not the robust type that would be used for constant-motion tracking 24x7x365 (as you see with an o3b terminal for MEO), they're motors that are intended to be used rarely in a fixed mount application where it aligns the panel at a certain heading one or two times a day, maximum, and stays that way.

One of the other problems is that the ultimate last hop for data would still have to be an rf link satellite to earth station through atmosphere, where lasers don't work well at all (there's a rain and junk in the air reason the telecom industry has given up on free space optics lasers for 1-2km, 1 to 20Gbps data links roof to roof and uses millimeter wave fdd radios instead)

Absolute worst case scenario it goes bankrupt and ends up like the second corporate incarnation of Iridium under entirely new owners. Which is very much a successful and essential, mission critical business today.

Nobody has enough asw weapons, and probably can't afford to build enough, quickly enough individual asw missiles, to take out even 15% of starlink. They launched four batches of 53 satellites each just in May and the month hasn't ended yet.

Additionally the US and NATO would see an act like that as barely one step below declaring nuclear war.

In north American slang to "boof" is to consume an illicit drug or mind altering substance by inserting it into the rectum.

Because a few discrete OOK lasers in a single frequency aiming at another moving target, while they will have a lot of capacity compared to an rf link, will have a minuscule amount of capacity in Gbps compared to a whole DWDM based, coherent 100GbE+ optical transport system operating on singlemode fiber.

Like, literally, twenty or thirty individual full duplex 400GbE circuits in two strands of fiber, if you have enough money to throw at the problem.

The only way you could approach matching the same capacity on a sat to sat link would be if you had a massive array of 30-40 separate laser tx and corresponding massive array of 30-40 rx receptors on the other side. It's easier to understand if you've seen a DWDM mux and demux in person in a telecom facility.

I'd like to be proven wrong if somebody can do multi Tbps of capacity on a sat to sat laser link, that would be awesome, but the challenges are very high.

If you have access to solid 3GPP (LTE) based wireless last mile at a good price your location is not the target market for starlink.

Terrestrial fiber based ISPs doing GPON can regularly spend several thousand dollars in new build outside plant fiber construction costs to bring a single home on net, but they know they have a very good chance of getting at least ten years if not more of revenue at $85 a month from it.

> it sounds like Musk wants to shift to being a satellite backbone,

Musk and his network team are not that dumb. They know about the Shannon limit in rf microwave and millimeter wave and the multi terahertz channel width capacity of basic 9/125 SM fiber.

Anything RF based has incredibly tiny capacity compared to modern 100/200/400GbE 40/80 channel dwdm systems. The capacity of two strands of fiber on a long haul path is incredible.

Internet backbone links carry far too much traffic to handle through even the most optimistic starlink sat to sat laser links.

I 100% concur with you on the foolishness of the cable. It should be some kind of ip68 rated twist lock Ethernet connector.

A flat multi element phased array is still better if you aim the flat part in the general direction where you want the most gain. This is the why the flat phased array radar in the nose radome of a modern air superiority fighter jet is mounted on a motorized steerable platform.

Go look at the combined revenue in billions per year from all the geostationary satellite owning companies like Inmarsat, thuraya, Intelsat, ses, eutelsat, arabsat, amos, etc. Most are publicly traded ompanies. LEO properly implemented will beat the pants off it in performance and speed.

I've seen people erect light duty 60' towers suitable for the wind load of one 60cm ptp microwave dish for a link to a local wisp, can be $2500-4500 all in including shipping, foundation, concrete work, etc.