SpaceX has unveiled a new standard kit for residential users of its Starlink satellite service, including a simplified non-motorised dish with a more robust design and faster Wi-Fi router.
The new dish is also rectangular but is installed with an attachable kickstand rather than a cylindrical pipe stem slotted into a large four-leg base.
It uses software-assisted manual positioning rather than motorised automatic orientation to align itself to communicate with Starlink’s satellite fleet.
The current Standard Actuated dish boasts motors that can change the dish’s orientation automatically based on a scan of the sky.
However, in MyBroadband’s tests of the antenna, it only does this once — at initial setup.
By eliminating the motors from the hardware and asking users to manually change the orientation based on sky scans, SpaceX cuts down on complexity and parts costs, potentially paving the way for cheaper units.
The other improvements with the new kit include its 110-degree field of view, likely due to being about 8cm longer than the Standard Actuated dish.
However, the kickstand measures 142mm, and the thickness of the kit is 39.7mm — for a combined length of 181.7mm.
That means the new Starlink kit will occupy much less vertical space, as the old base design put its top surface 343mm above the ground.
The fixed Standard dish also gets an IP67 Type 4 protection rating as opposed to the IP54 of the previous model.
