starlink – Dan Murray

When I got the V2 user terminal (“Dishy”), I was lucky in that a few folks had already torn them apart: Ken Keiter went deep with a destructive teardown that shed a lot of light on the internals, and MikeOnSpace took a slightly less destructive (yet still power-tool driven) approach.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to dig in a bit myself, and started collaborating with Lennert Wouters on the disassembly and EMMC dumping. Lennert went much further – eventually posting an awesome writeup on what he found.

So, having had a peek into V2, I was anxious to see what changed on V3. Were they using the same components – SoC, antenna setup, motors, etc? Or had the whole design changed with the updated form factor?

Having explored Dishy v2 (the round version) in detail, I was excited to get my hands on a v3 – the newer, smaller rectangular dish. However, they’ve been pretty hard to get ahold of, and my “cell” is currently full.

Recently, SpaceX enabled “roaming” functionality, which means the user terminals (uterms – lovingly referred to as “Dishy” by SpaceX) are able to work in any active cell, not just their home cell. This makes it possible to take the uterm just about anywhere and get online – pretty cool. I’ve tested this and it works well with my v2 uterm.

I figured this would be a good opportunity to get a v3 uterm and see how/if roaming works when the uterm has never even been at its home location.

I found an active cell (about 200 miles away from me) and ordered a v3 uterm to ship to my home. The home cell didn’t matter much to me, since I plan on roaming with it anyway.

Surprisingly, it shipped faster than estimated, and about 2 weeks later, it showed up:

Category: starlink

Dishy V3 – Teardown

“Squarey” – Dishy v3