The way technology is headed there is a 110% chance that the phased array tech gets miniaturized and put into a phone. And once the constellation is filled in, you’ll be able to find any tiny slice of sky and talk to a starlink sat that’s flying through it. Indoors is still a problem but who knows, things are always evolving.
You can't take say Moore's Law for chip tech and slap it on to radio tech. They're fundamentally different physical processes. There are limits to radio transmission and reception bandwidth and range due to the basic physics that you can't end run. The inverse square law is a harsh master, for any given level of technology a transmitter 100x closer is going to have a 10,000x advantage however you slice it.
What they might be able to do is expand this to something like limited texting, or maybe down the line even non-realtime voice messaging.
We are still able to have two-way communication with both Voyagers.
Google’s Lyra codec can already get down to 3Kb/s and be reasonably audible. It’s not a stretch to imagine within a few years we’ll be able to push that to below 1Kb/s.
Taking those two things together, I think it’s fairly reasonable to assume at least text and voice are within reach.
Reminiscent of Vernor Vinge's "evocations", as mentioned in A Fire Upon the Deep:
> The screen showed a color image with high resolution. Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation…. Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they looked several years out of style. Ølvira [the ship] was matching old video with the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less that four thousand bits per second; Central was taking no chances.
> [...]
> The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people Kjet knew had been transferred […] The processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrow-band signal from Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background and evoking the image shown.
Sounds a lot like DALL-E plus a finely tuned training database on both ends could create this sort super-compression if we wanted to. I could imagine having a crisp, real-time (But artificial) 4K video conference at a few kb/s.
Sparse array fallacy. You can't make a phased array too small and have high directionality-- you lose all the power in the side lobes. This one's underlying physics.
If you use smaller antenna elements you must use a higher frequency, and higher frequencies are more attenuated by the earth's atmosphere (generally, when you get to THz there is a window or else visible light wouldn't be able to penetrate) so they have no chance of making it to a satellite.
If you use less elements you lose all your gain in the side lobes, as the other commenter mentioned
Phased arrays are already in phones that have mm wave antennas ;) usually only 1 dimension though. But it's not inconceivable they will add one capable to reach a satellite. Obviously the number of elements and thus the gain will be lower than the one Ina starlink station. But with slower speeds you don't need as strong a signal.
