Starlink broadband receiving dishes become warm attracting stray cats in the cold

The background of the story is as follows. Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme is putting thousands of satellites into orbit around the Earth to provide a broadband Internet connection to remote places where it is too difficult to provide it through cabling underground. These places will have Internet broadband connection from the satellite sending signals to the ground which are picked up by Starlink receiving dishes.

At the moment the satellite constellation, as they call it, has grown to over 1,700 satellites through 2021. Many more are planned. It’s taken 10 years to get this far and the cost has been more than US$10 billion.

When the system is working the receiving dishes become warm. One person posted on the Reddit.com website that he checked his Starlink dish with a thermal imaging sight and it indicated that the whole dish, even the underside of it, becomes warm. If the dish is ground mounted then you might find cats and other animals on it as you see in the photograph, and under it.

The photograph is intriguing because you see five stray cats huddled together on one of these dishes. It is a unique photograph. For that reason, it has attracted attention on Twitter.

My presumption is that the dish won’t work if there are five cats sitting on top of it 😉. But I’m told that the dishes change position automatically in order to position themselves accurately to receive the signals. When that happens, the cats will have to jump off. That is my understanding of what is going on.

I am sure that this problem was not foreseen by Elon Musk and his talented team of engineers. I suspect, too, that if there are no stray cats in the area, other animals will take advantage of the warm dish in cold weather. The dishes may be a catalyst for fights between cats over the right to occupy space on them.

If you are using the Starlink broadband system and you read this I would be delighted to hear from you? I guess the solution is obvious: to put the dish in a place where cats can’t get to it. In the picture, clearly, the cats had easy access as it is on the ground. You can see the fencing behind the dish. The photo was taken from inside the photographer’s home through a ground floor window.

P.S. 5G phones work on fast direct satellite to phone connections. One day I suspect that internet connections such as 5G will take over from broadband but that may be a simplistic idea. I don’t know.

Here is the tweet:

Note: This is an embedded tweet. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.

Lastly on this topic, here is a video on how to set up your Starlink dish 👍.

Note: This is a video from another website which is embedded here. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.