And not just to your home. I'm very strongly considering ponying up the money for Starlink to be able to work while camped out in the middle of nowhere.
I do this. Anywhere I can drag my trailer. I have a favorite location up in the mountains that gets no signal of any kind, but now that I have Starlink I can get perfect Internet there. So instead of going up for a weekend to relax, I go up for a week at a time, work during the day, and come home on the weekend to top up supplies.
Yep, that's exactly the sort of routine I have in mind.
Longer-term, I'm hoping for that favorite location to be a piece of land I actually own, in which case my goal is to setup a semi-permanent "base" with solar, Starlink, and a yurt or somesuch.
"fits in a backpack", with the implication that it will consume the internal volume of said backpack. That does not make it a solution for parent's "backpacking trip", unless you wish to sleep on the ground in the clothes you wore. And you ate before your left. The "heavy battery" was just icing on the cake. You know some backpackers saw the handles of their toothbrush to impress other backpackers^W^W^Wsave weight, right? :-)
That's not to say Starlink or a competitor can't get there eventually. I already have pocketable/backpackable device that can shove data up and down a satellite link (Garmin InReach), it's just dog-slow, and that's likely down to the antenna and transmitter power if I were to guess. Someone with more RF smarts than I can probably cook up a foldable antenna, perhaps boost the power a bit, I dunno. But the PoC is there, it just needs iteration.
This is more of a physics problem than an engineering problem.
Garmin InReach uses an omnidirectional antenna on the Iridium network. With an omni antenna your S/N ratio is simply too low to send bits fast. If you made the device powerful enough to roast birds in flight it might work for faster uplink but then it would be dangerous to you too and the FCC would never let you use it anyway. And even this wouldn't improve your downlink speed.
The only way to improve the speed in both directions is to use a directional antenna, which points most of the uplink energy toward the satellite and concentrates the satellite's incoming energy to get the S/N ratio high in both directions. That's exactly what Starlink does.
This is made even more difficult because we're talking about LEO satellites and LEO satellites move. So the antenna has to track the satellite. Again this is what Starlink is doing.
(You can also use GEO satellites which don't move, but then latency becomes terrible. That's how the older satellite internet systems work.)
It's certainly possible to build a portable, directional, tracking LEO satellite antenna. That's exactly what the Starlink RV solution is. But it's never going to be as small as your Garmin unit.
