Why do all my viewers in the Ukraine and it's from Kiev So I'm surprised it got here actually with all the stuff that's been happening. So I hope all my viewers in the Ukraine are safe. Where are we all right? Uh oh, it looks like I have some Ukrainian chocolate. Oh Bobby does.

Hmm. good stuff. Um, looks like I've got some busted boards. Oh okay, it looks like it's an antenna array.

Um oh what else have I got? I've got uh, the best chocolate handmade vegan vegan chocolate. I Know all my vegan viewers out there. Um, it's Leopold Is it good? Leave it in the comments down below. Oh I have to try that out.

Beautiful! So it's like a it's almost like a coconutty kind of. is that like coconut on top of chocolate or something? And we've got some Choice fridge magnets terrific stuff sent in by Oleg thank you very much. Uh Olay Kukoff I'll uh put his uh website down below because he has put it here and he's on the twitterverse as well. Um, this is a fourth sucker.

the Sav. Seriously. Oh no wonder the name was familiar. Um fourth suck of the Sam it's OLED from yeah I'm still living and working here in Kiev despite the situation.

All right. Ah, it looks like it's a Starlink KU Band Um, the PCB or a chunk of it looks like it's been destroyed I wonder how? Um and it looks like a Starlink satellite? Yeah yeah. Started with a missile explosion nearby. Many crazy things happen next, but this is another learning story in a few days.

I Found that Starling service was the officially activated I rebuilt my styling terminal successfully activated. Thanks Starlink, Thanks! SpaceX That's how I became one of the first if not the first civilian Starlink user in the Ukraine There you go I posted your speed test results uh and my accounts exploded with private messages. Yep I can imagine um for a few weeks I Answered the same questions and finally gave up and created the Starling USA Facebook Community More than 12 000 members? Wow, Yes, we've got Starlink. Um CBS that were shot by shrapnel.

You can see the damage on one of the boards. it's impossible to fix obviously because like it's normally like this big and we've got just chunks. oh boy. oh seriously, look at that.

There you go. I'll get up closer with the macro lens on the main bench but geez they this was a styling dish and I think I'm blowing up. Unbelievable Awesome! I Like thank you very much. Stay safe mate! let's go check it out on the bench.

Oh, check it out. look what? oh my. God You can see like the big shrapnel. Marks Here you can see where it's absolutely torn us right through this thing.

Wow. You can see the fibers have been ripped out of this thing. Oh that's terrible. Muriel And then we've got this what looks like a patch, uh, array mylar sheet with, uh, some conductive patch antennas on it that's just been ripped right through and this, uh, plastic spacer material here has just been absolutely torn ass right through.

Unbelievable. So we've got multiple pieces here. Here's the top of it. So the white dish.

So this is like the radome uh, top section of it. Then we've got a, um, a spacer uh material here, the thickness and the diameters of all the spaces and everything that really is critical to like. Because this is a phased array beam forming antenna with like I don't know how many thousands of elements, um on it, it's you know, it's pretty remarkable. Then we've got another uh spacer material here.

so I don't know I've lost order I've lost the order of how these actually uh came out. As I said, this is a sheet of uh, patch antennas on here. So we've got these conductive, uh patch antennas and these like are coupled um through and it looks like we've got another sheet here as well so these would be separated by spaces. I'm kind of yeah, I've mixed up the order of this, but anyway, it's basically a coupled uh patch array system like this.

and then we've got is that is that a spacer that's non-conductive I Think that's just an an aperture? That's not the same aperture as here. Oh okay, right. they've got circles like that so one of the patches go goes in the middle like that. If we line them up, then we'll find that, they'll They will eventually line up in the middle.

Yep, they'll light up in the middle like that, so that's what that's for. But this is all to do with like, you know, preventing the side lobes or controlling the side lobes in the phased array as you transmit and receive on these things. So it's all complicated. RF stuff I won't uh, pretend to be able to explain it all to you I think um Sharia from the signal path has done a video on this.

So I'll try and find that and I'll link it in. but look, look, look at the giant chunk. Oh, a moment. Silence please for this.

Ukrainian Starlink terminal. you can see that we've actually got a more, uh, intact piece here, so maybe we can take that apart layer by layer. But anyway, here's the main St chip down here. Let's get the macro on that.

So there it is. I'll put up the data sheet for that. Um, what are the other little smaller ones I can't see those? Are they little like little muxes or something? I'll try and uh, zoom into that because you're probably watching this in 4k, aren't you? I can't see this on the camcorder screen. So I'll try and find a data sheet for the smaller jobbies.

but yeah, um, the St They make some of the best in the business. So yeah, this has not been developed by uh, Starlink. They're just using off-the-shelf chips, but there's a ton. You know, really? um, you know, exotic RF engineering that goes into this, uh, sort of stuff.

So you know there's lots of really high-end expensive RF tools that allow you to design all these coupled uh, patch antenna, phased array systems and and simulate them. and uh, you know they would have done that until the scales come on. Oh, check out the delamination on the PCB Oh oh, that just hurts. So it looks like we have an almost complete wedge of our Starlink uh dish here.

So there you go. that's I Think that's a like a complete section so you can sandwich that uh together. but I won't go hugely in depth. So yeah, radio material looks like just fiberglass.

I think um, just you know, Fr4 type fiberglass. Maybe it's you know, higher end than that because it needs to be uh, transparent. You know it needs to be our As Rfr transparent, offer as little attenuation as possible and then it's also got a you know, reject water and uh, stuff like that. so they're probably coated that with something that you know because you don't want like a like a film of water on there or something like that ruin your day at these sort of frequencies.

which by the way, um 11 gig uh, down leg link and about 14 gigahertz. uh Uplink on that but there are various then Banks above that as well. I'll put up the frequency ranges here, but you know it's pretty up there. Damn, We got what looks like some sort of like plastic spacer but that's probably like to mount the back of it because this, like here only goes to there.

so the PCB doesn't extend all the way. so this is like part of the plastic backing or something like that. part of the housing. something like that.

The housing array Oleg was kind enough to include where our section came from. Um, there you go. So we've got this little chunk over here like this and uh, like there's a whole bunch of voltage Regulators down here. power system on chip Ram uh and uh, then the GPS up here as well and then um I don't know with Square Terminal I don't know what that is.

can you get a square starlink dish anyway? Um, the other section has been cut out from here and I'm not sure like the other ones come from a Square Terminal do they come in square versions I Thought they only had like the round version like this, but um I don't know. I'll have to I don't know anything about starlink. so yeah, I don't have one. but anyway, the Chunk we got just came out of the antenna array section here and it was kind enough to include a block diagram as well.

So St XP 70 DSP Uh. core, that's a Wilkinson divider and low noise amplifier, power amplifier and the it looks like a horizontal looking vertically uh, polarized uh transmitter and receive elements on there. So yeah, the polarization is uh, different for those by the looks of it. And there's a system on chip down here and there's a bus.

Um, and the baseband signals go between there. and so yeah, there's a big beam forming DSP And you know there's a lot of magic happening here. So you can see how the patch antenna just sits on top of oh, sits on top of that spacer. So that's a fiberglass spacer with oh, it's just like a really thin um, you know PCB prepreg material and these are just floating.

These aren't actually connected uh to anything. You can see us. small little hole down in there. Let me get the macro again.

Yeah, you can see that there's a little hole down in there, but that's not electrically connected to anything because this is your little copper. They've got notches taken out of here and that'd all be all part of uh, the how they've designed this uh coupled patch uh antenna system. So I won't pretend to be able to explain that to you, but they've got a little hole there. So I'd say given that each sort of like little pocket of like each little uh patch antenna is in this pocket here and it's all glued on.

I would say that's um, to let some air between, you know they're relatively sealed. Maybe to get some air movement between the the top and the bottom Uh elements there. for you know, thermal uh properties and stuff like that. That would be my guess.

Then we've got another spacer here and then yet another uh, circular patch here which we saw which is basically uh, this here but it's actually covered and um, then that has another layer on it which goes down to the main board where the actual antenna element is. We haven't even gotten to the antenna element yet. these are just the multi-layer coupled patch. Arrangement Now what's interesting here is you can see all these little copper squares in here.

These are actually just isolated copper squares. These aren't part of the patch elements because the this is, these are the patch elements you've seen. There's two of them. These little squares here are what's known as the electromagnetic band Gap structure which as the name sort of suggests it.

um, stops the electromagnetic waves in certain uh, bandwidth since at certain frequencies from getting through. So once again, I won't pretend to be able to completely analyze um this. But yeah, leave it in the comments below if you're an expert on electromagnetic band. Gap structures.

but yeah, that's what that is. It's just a floating array of squares which is different and you can see that they're much are smaller and they're very different to the Um array elements here. Unfortunately, I can't really? uh, delaminate this board to get in there to show you the actual Um the actual antenna element that's actually connected through to the receiver and transmitter chips because it's on all the inner layers like that I can't get through to it. So this round uh dish, we can't see that.

but I'm going to assume it's very similar to this Uh dish here, which is the um, you know, the rectangular version of the round dish and we can actually see uh, the elements on the bottom. But the construction of these two types is um, you know, substantially a different like. they use different Uh layering Arrangements Like this one use, the circular patch is on a separate Um sort of like plastic sheet here. whereas on on this Uh design, it's actually um, looks like it's on like a fiberglass.

uh, prepreg in there. so they're physically, um, quite different constructions. The um, the upper I guess I guess you call that the upper the outermost Um coupled uh patch that looks very similar. but once again, this is on a PCB and these are on sheets.

So um, yeah, this is like a lower cost construction to be cheaper to get this than it would for this one. So I don't know if this is a newer uh, this, uh, rectangular one's a newer design and this circular one's an older one. Don't know? Leave it in the comments if you do though. But anyway.

um, this. We can actually believe it or not, the antennas are on here. You can start seeing those in the reflections there. They've got that uh, horizontal and vertical pattern which as you saw here are the transmit and receive elements.

You can see them there in different orientations. So each one of these is going to have uh, be coupled to those um and those patches. Um, on top of that. So each pair like this is going to be one element and they're going to be covered with these individual patches like this with the these two different art patches with the spaces on there and these are effectively uh, passive radiators and well, RF aficionados go uh, crazy down in the comments about how a jewel, um, you know.

coupled patch antenna system um Works in there with the polarization of the transmitter and receiver. Anyway, one of those is transmit. One of those is uh, receive and as I said, they work on different uh frequency ranges 11 gig and about 14 gig. one for Uplink one for downlink of course.

So there you have it. You can see that that this is just like traces like this, but there there's a reason that there are shaped like that. Uh, you know you need your RF simulator to tell you why. If you, if you're into that sort of thing, leave it in the comment it's down below.

But anyway, they're effectively like a h uh pattern. um, antenna patch. it's They're all like basically patch antennas and so that's going down to that via there. And this one is.

Where's the Veer attached to that one? Can't see it? It's got to be there. Is that it above there? I don't know. it's really quite hard to see, but I think you can actually see that one going off though. So I'm not sure what the deal is there.

but yeah. anyway, two little H patches. Cool huh? Got a second suck of the sub. Snaptron who make uh, the best domes I.E Tactile Snap.

uh duffums in the business? um I've used those for oh I don't know how long I've been using Snaptron? uh domes. They're my go-to first choice for. you know if I need tactile domes and stuff like that? Back when I was like into designing my calculator, watches and stuff, it was like oh yeah, they were like the go-to uh one. So oh, it looks like we actually have a real hey yeah we have a reel of domes but it looks like we might have a booklet of do we have like sample domes? We've got some data sheets we'll have a look so thank you very much.

Nicole Kangos who's uh, the marketing manager apps at uh Snaptron? oh hi Dave I Hope all is well included. This new Smt dome uh switches. uh we developed um I've got new ones. Wow and all their design guides and stuff.

If you're into your snap. like because there's a lot of technology that goes into snap like domes, especially if you want a PCB Mount them If you want to mount them on uh, like like membranes and stuff like that, there's stiff back directly on uh, cases and all sorts of things. um, straight on Pcbs. There's a lot of Art and Science which goes into Um domes and they've got all sorts of um, like technical information and app Notes and stuff like that.

So introducing the solder Dome beyond the solder Dome So yeah, these are designed for pick and place directly onto the PCB I Thought they already had that little protein here for the marketing. Uh, when you give these to why like a Snaptron will send you. You know, if you're a company and you're looking to, you know, buy a million domes or whatever, they'll send you all the information and I'll probably come around there and take you to lunch and all sorts of things. Um, but uh yeah, it'd be nice in this particular case to have like a sample PCB just the size of the business card or something.

Um, in fact have it on the back side of the business card. So instead of just having this nice very nice Schmick card like card look at that. Picked them up from the printers yesterday. Good coloring that's bone and the lettering is something called Cillian Braille by the way You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet raise lettering pale Nimbus White look at that subtle off white coloring, a tasteful thickness of it.

oh my. God It even has a watermark I actually have it as a PCB and put patterns on the back that match the footprint so that then we can like. You can just like solder them down. you can put some paste and then see how they Reflow and all sorts of stuff.

So yeah, that would have been cool. There you go. Data sheet for these new uh surface Mountain domes here. 154 grams uh classic, uh displacement? uh curve here for the force and there you go.

There's got you've got your layout for it. might be a bit tricky to sort of like design that into your PCB um footprint. but yeah, there you go. No workers.

So there's the tape. There's a whole reel of them. Oh where are they? It makes me want to design something just so I can like pick and place them. That'd be awesome.

flush. Get on there you bastard. Oh there it is. Oh I Love the snappy brings a tear to the eye in your Dome.