Details of New Battery Powered Starlink Broadband Mini 2 Dish Revealed
Network engineer Oleg Kutkov has leaked that Starlink’s next-gen Mini 2 dish terminal, which has yet to be officially introduced, has “finally entered production” and is confirmed to have a built-in “4S battery“, which usually refers to a Lithium Polymer (LiPo) or Li-ion pack with four individual cells wired in series. Further details have also been leaked.
Regular readers will recall how we’ve reported on previous leaks about a new rugged Mini dish (here, here and here), which was later previewed by Elon Musk during an unrelated interview piece (pictured – the smaller of two dishes above). According to Oleg, the new Mini 2 panel PCB measures 225 × 273 mm, which compares with 236 × 276 mm for the Mini 1.
The new dish is also said to have 549 antenna elements (the Mini 1 had 571), a lower EIRP (Effective Isotropic Radiated Power – the maximum power a radio transmitter radiates in a specific direction) of 27.4dBW (27.57dBW on the Mini 1), extremely low duty cycle (11% vs 75%), a built-in 4S battery managed by a BQ40Z-series system (capacity unknown) and a USB-C port for charging (11-24v input).
Advertisement
“The MAC thermal thresholds have been increased to 95°C and 99°C, compared with 79°C and 83°C on Mini 1. The battery thermal shutdown threshold is set to 80°C,” added Oleg. The onboard chipset is the same “Catapult” system as before and GPS is also present, which as has been “explicitly configured for in-motion use“. All of this largely confirms the earlier leaks and hints that the new dish will deliver slower upload speeds, but an official launch is still pending.
Starlink currently has around 10,840 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – mostly at altitudes of between c.340-550km. Residential customers in the UK currently pay from £40 a month for the Residential 100Mbps unlimited data plan, which also promises uploads of c.15-35Mbps and low latency connectivity (c.20ms). Faster packages exist at greater cost, while more restrictive (data capped) options also exist for roaming users (e.g. £55 per month for 100GB of data).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« BT Reveals Broadband Video Streaming Stats for England v France Match
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.