Globalstar SEC filing, Apple to use 85% of its satellite network capacity

Re:Globalstar SEC filing, Apple to use 85% of its satellite ... by sbierwagen on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @04:48PM (#32756615)

Those large external antennas are high gain. Gain is a function of antenna area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_(antenna)#Effective_a...

Apple's antenna can only be smaller if it's lower gain. I would bet they're making that tradeoff because they don't need as much bandwidth. (Emergency pings could be measured in dozens of bytes, let alone kilobytes or megabytes.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Globalstar SEC filing, Apple to use 85% of its satellite ... by squeaky-clean on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @05:15PM (#32757009)

The Aperture and Gain section of that article says that gain refers to the directivity of an antenna

> antennas with large effective apertures are considered high-gain antennas (or beam antennas), which have relatively small angular beam widths.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Globalstar SEC filing, Apple to use 85% of its satellite ... by DesiLurker on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @05:40PM (#32757333)

I wonder if there could be a bluetooth (or connected) high gain antenna attachment for the new iphone they could sell as accessory.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Globalstar SEC filing, Apple to use 85% of its satellite ... by Brusco_RF on Thursday September 08, 2022 @11:48AM (#32767335)

None of the RF ports come out to a connector so no that couldnt really work.

You CAN get high gain antennas for things like your WiFi router, it's my goto when an elderly relative complains about their wifi range.

You can't actually increase power with an (inactive) antenna but you CAN change it's radiation pattern. The higher gain omnidirectional antennas just take a radiation pattern that looks like a sphere (0dB gain) and squashes it into a donut shape. So you get more range laterally around the antenna at the expense of less above and below it

[ Parent | on HN ]