Interesting thought. My first thought is that the Starlink satellites are going to be around 500-550 km and their transmitters and receivers are likely to be very focused on communications with ground stations, so I doubt they’d work at all for cubesats above the Starlink constellation.

For those deployed into lower orbit, say from the ISS, I guess there’s a higher chance, but I’m sure the network is very finely tuned for communications with fixed ground stations rather than orbiting satellites traveling at what’s likely to be a high relative speed and much closer to the constellation. Not to mention there’s different licensing requirements on space-to-space communications (which Starlink between its own satellites, but not others).

I doubt it’d work even if SpaceX allowed it to be done. If they are interested in supporting cubesats, then they’d probably have to make design changes to the satellites to accommodate it.

73,

Paul, N8HM

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 23:06 Mike Hoblinski via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> wrote:

I was reading that Starlink may open public beta testing to a small group later this year. Still no word on the type of equipment the public would use to connect. But this got me wondering about the possibility of orbiting Cubsats being able to use a satellite network such as starlink. Just a hypothetical question I thought I would throw around.

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