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A PhD student has discovered signs that SpaceX is working on a Starlink Mini dish with a built-in battery and USB-C port.
“This is new in the May firmware version,” says Jinwei Zhao, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. The firmware also seems to tease a battery status function.
Zhao is part of a research team at the university under computer science Professor Jianping Pan, who has long been studying Starlink and other satellite internet providers. Zhao regularly downloads Starlink firmware releases for its dishes and publishes them on GitHub.
“From time to time, we can see some new features being added,” he tells PCMag. Zhao has now discovered mentions of a battery and USB-C in a May 7 firmware release covering Starlink’s implementation of the open-source gRPC protocol, which lets a program call a function on a server program on a different machine.
For the first time, Zhao spotted some computer code referring to different power sources—PowerSource_USBC, PowerSource_BATTERY, and PowerSource_USBC_AND_BATTERY.
(Credit: Jinwei Zhao)
(Credit: Jinwei Zhao)In addition, he discovered another code snippet with the term “message DishBatteryStats," which can return three fields, including "state_of_charge," whether any charging is taking place, and the power source.
“Right now, there is no Starlink Mini dish with a battery that has been publicly or officially released yet. But they added those features to the gRPC definition first,” he said, suggesting the company is cooking up something that’ll arrive in the coming weeks or months.
The battery and USB-C mentions might be connected to a discovery by Ukrainian Starlink repair expert Oleg Kutkov, who noticed the term “MINI1_RUGGED_PROD1” in a firmware release.
Kutkov suspects this mysterious rugged dish is built for industrial and military use. Adding support for a built-in battery and USB-C would certainly boost the product’s appeal. The current Mini dish model requires users to buy the Starlink Barrel Jack to USB-C adapter cable for such access. Customers can also buy a third-party battery accessory or an adapter cable to use the Mini via a car’s cigarette lighter plug.
PCMag's Brian Westover, who reviews Starlink, weighed in, saying “a battery would be a big upgrade for the Mini, since it would make it more portable, especially away from the standard outlets and vehicle power that the current model relies on. USB-C would make it easier to use with existing phone and laptop chargers."
Still, SpaceX will likely want to make the battery relatively small to keep the dish portable. So the on-battery use might be limited to an hour or two, Westover said. He added that an official battery-powered Starlink Mini "would be really big for field work, emergency use, and vehicle/off-grid setups. More of a self-contained system, and a lot more convenient when power is spotty or you need to switch power sources without losing connection."
We’ll have to wait and see. So far, SpaceX hasn’t responded to a request for comment about the rugged mini dish mentioned in the firmware. In the meantime, Zhao said he’s been studying Starlink and other competing systems with Jianping Pan’s team to help improve satellite internet services for users through technical suggestions and research papers.