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could you roll-your-own satellite broadband using this way?

• roedog 16y ago
  The orbit geometry looks to not be compatible with that objective. A 300 km polar orbit would put it over your ground station once or twice a day for several minutes.
  • cryptoz 16y ago
    Could you perhaps purchase many of them? Do they all take the same orbit (useless) or could you build a small private network in space? If they can launch into even just slightly different orbits, you could dramatically improve your uptime.
    • russss 16y ago
      You get what you pay for, and for $8k I don't think you'll get the opportunity to specify your orbit.
    • roedog 16y ago
      This is what the irridium system does, as well as Milstar, and other commerical telecom systems. Irridium is a medium orbit, where milstar and the commercial telcom are in geosynchronous orbits. A geo satellite is typically a few thousand kg with kilowatts of power. But for the low cost option consider how much bandwidth can the onboard transmitter they provide handle. How big will your ground station need to be in order to pick up the signal? I suspect a tracking dish and hardware will exceed $8k by at least an order of magnitude.