5333 private links
MMarsh Ars Praefectus
7y
3,252
Subscriptor
From a "can it be done?" tech standpoint, I think this is very cool.
From a "can you offer a profitable and economical service this way?" standpoint, I'm not optimistic, for a few reasons.
The first problem is the latency, of course. That's going to be just as bad as with any other GEO satellite. We put up with it for decades when there was no better option, but now that LEO constellations exist, a 700 ms ping time is a hard sell unless there are other compelling advantages.
Which brings us to the competition. Inmarsat and Iridium, being part of GMDSS, have the advantage in the commercial maritime market. Starlink is rapidly replacing Viasat and Hughes in the terrestrial residential, business, and vehicle-portable markets; OneWeb and Kuiper ought to be nipping at its heels sometime soon. Who is the target market for a product that can't compete with Inmarsat or Iridium on coverage, and can't compete with Starlink on throughput or latency?
And then you get to the tech aspects of it. Yes, it's possible to put a small satellite in GEO and relay comms from it, and it's an impressive technical achievement. But the physics of antennas and of RF propagation don't change. How much performance was given up to make it work with less power and smaller antennas? Could more efficient use of that same RF spectrum have been achieved with a larger satellite with more power, more spot beams, and larger antenna apertures to allow the use of tighter geometry in those spot beams?
If the target market is Alaska, then in the panhandle (eg. Ketchikan) you're aiming your ground station antennas about 35° above the horizon. That's tolerable as long as you have clear land or ocean to the south. Up in Anchorage, though, that angle drops to 29° and in Nome it's 25°. Hold your hand at arm's length, put your thumb on the southern horizon, and stretch your pinky vertically above it to full span; that's 25°. If there are trees or mountains or weather below that mark, you have no chance of using any GEO satellites from that location.
