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Iridium Completes Constellation Replacement
- pmorici 8y agoAnyone know a good source of info on the Iridium Certus service they are supposed to start offering with this new constellation? Based on the marketing material I could find it seems like the upstream is only ~350 Kbps even though there are plans to offer 1.4 Mbps downstream service eventually. Hard to understand why someone would pay for that over the other services out there where the upstream bandwidth scales with the downstream.
- skybrian 8y agoPresumably people pay for this when nobody else can provide the coverage they need?
- reaperducer 8y agoPresumably people pay for this when nobody else can provide the coverage they need? We have a winner! Speaking as someone who has to regularly do development work from a solar+Jeep-battery-powered satellite internet connection, the more companies that put birds in the air, the better it is for me. Unfortunately, since startup costs as so high, what little increased competition there is isn't really dropping the price/megabyte ratio. Save me, Elon Musk!
- wuunderbar 8y agoWhat sort of work are you in?
- ams6110 8y ago"Has to?" What do you do, and why do you have no other options?
- jessriedel 8y agoI'm guessing based on context that "development work" means assistance work in developing countries, not software development :)
- reaperducer 8y agoI'm guessing based on context that "development work" means assistance work in developing countries, not software development :) It's actually web development, deployed on fogs (my name for localized temporary clouds) in very poor, very rural communities in the United States. It's the sorts of places where roads are primitive, electricity and clean water are scarce, and internet is a luxury. These settlements are often cut off from the outside world for weeks or months each year due to seasonal (deep snow), or temporary (flash floods) events. "Landline" telephone service, when it exists, is usually via HF radio. If you buy land there, the county makes you sign a document acknowledging that no water, sewer, or medical services are available, and police may take days to get to you. The kinds of places where even FedEx and UPS won't guarantee overnight delivery at any price. The place where I was last week was seven miles from the fringes of the nearest cell service. But it had pretty fast wifi, thanks to a fixed-microwave link on a single pole stuck 40 feet into the air. Every time a breeze came along, the pole would sway, the dish at the top would go out of alignment, and the connection would drop. This is why every time I see someone on HN spout about how "You always get an internet connection by hacking your neighbor's wifi connection" I shake my head. But it's nice to get out of the office every once in a while.
- jessriedel 8y agoThanks for the info!
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoI want to hear more! Why are you doing this? Is this a side effect of your job or are you helping these communities? I’d be interested in doing this kind of work, either domestically or internationally.
- rdl 8y agoI'd be totally fine with this for m2m. Also, iridium covers polar areas, not an option from GEO, and there aren't (any?) other commercial constellation services with south-polar coverage. Admittedly a small market.
- hylaride 8y agoHard to understand why someone would pay for that over the other services out there where the upstream bandwidth scales with the downstream. Shipping, airplanes, and people/companies otherwise in the middle of nowhere (eg remote mines).
- ffwacom 8y agoYachts to download weather data ‘grib files’, and email. Costs over a dollar per mb.
- pmorici 8y agoPerhaps but you can do the same with BGAN, iDirect, or Kymeta Kyway with better bandwidth this just seems like it has no competitive advantage over competitors except perhaps coverage at the poles.
- benjohnson 8y agoFor me, the size of an Iridium terminal is paramount - I can fit one in my pocket where a typical BGAN terminal needs a backpack. As I understand it, Iridium terminals are much more power efficient as their low-earth satellites are orders of magnitudes closer.
- pmorici 8y agoLatency could be an advantage. The New iridium terminals for the higher speed data are larger than BGAN though, at least the couple that I've seen specs on.
- Robotbeat 8y agoLatency.
- ffwacom 8y agoNorth Pole coverage was the reason.
- Havoc 8y ago> Hard to understand why someone would pay for that Friend was telling me about the cost of internet on a superyacht...holy shiiaatt.
- sverige 8y agoBut wait, back up a second to the cost of the superyacht itself, then the internet costs are piddling in that frame of reference. And I suspect that the cost of the superyacht is piddling for the kind of person who buys one. The 0.1% really do live in a different world.
- dzhiurgis 8y agoYou can buy pretty decent yacht for 50-100k to live in for the rest of your life. Doing web dev over satellite would cost same as on superyacht.
- nixgeek 8y agoJames Hamilton has blogged on connectivity costs for MV Dirona [1][2][3] on a few occasions, and ISTR his provider KVH is $15000/mo for 150GB allotment at 'Unlimited' speeds (approximately 10Mbps down and 3Mbps up) and $9499/mo for all you can eat at 4Mbps down / 1Mbps up. [1] https://mvdirona.com/2015/08/communications-at-sea/ https://mvdirona.com/2015/08/communications-at-sea/ [2] https://mvdirona.com/2018/04/control-systems-on-dirona/ https://mvdirona.com/2018/04/control-systems-on-dirona/ [3] https://mvdirona.com/2018/03/kvh-v7-hts-twice-the-speed-more-coverage/ https://mvdirona.com/2018/03/kvh-v7-hts-twice-the-speed-more...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- baq 8y agoLow latency connectivity in the middle of the ocean?
- fliptail 8y agoThere's an excellent and fascinating book that describes, among many other things, how the satellites were saved from being "de-orbited" (crashed) about 20 years ago. It's called Eccentric Orbits. https://www.amazon.com/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John-Bloom/dp/0802126782 https://www.amazon.com/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John-Bloom/d...
- ehsankia 8y agoHere's an example of how to misplaces satellites were used to test General Relativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKwJayXTZUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKwJayXTZUs
- n0pe_p0pe 8y agoEccentric Orbits was one of my favorite reads from last year. This article also gives a pretty decent tl;dr: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d34bmk/iridium-next-satellite-constellation-spacex-desch https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d34bmk/iridium-ne...
- jonathankoren 8y agoYeah, I was at Motorola when they were supposed to be deorbited. I knew a guy that worked in the lab when they went through the lab to start to destroy all the equipment as part of the liquidation process. He saved one of the iconic brick handsets for me. No sim card. Just Accelerated Life Test Unit 4. It's been a proud possession of mine for years.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoPlease make sure it ends up in a museum eventually.
- jonathankoren 8y agoI believe the Computer History Museum already has one.
- chinathrow 8y agoWow, that was like the first article in years which managed to load ads through uBlock origin while giving my CPU a nice increase in load. Does anyone know how they do that?
- homero 8y agoI've seen sites use websockets
- zamadatix 8y agoTry enabling additional lists in the settings and grabbing uBlock Origin Extra if you're on Chrome. I didn't run into any ads.
- PhantomGremlin 8y agoFirefox plus NoScript (with JavaScript off by default) means I had absolutely no CPU problem reading that article. It's my default browsing configuration.
- Sharlin 8y agoIt’s a shame Iridium flares are quickly becoming a thing of the past. If you’ve never seen one, it’s about time!
- blemasle 8y agoWell if the entire constellation is replaced, that's too late for that isn't it ?
- baq 8y agoReplacements are in orbit but originals haven’t been all deorbited yet.
- ddunkin 8y agoThere are still other interesting things to see, Equisat has LED flashers: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2576.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...
- projektfu 8y agoI'm curious how a rocket delivers multiple satellites spaced around a single orbit. Anyone know of something for laypeople that describes the process? I think it's really cool.
- olaulaja 8y agoI don't have a good article on this but I'd assume the rocket delivers the satellites to an orbit slightly below the target one. The satellites can then move to the final orbit on their own (small transfers take much less energy than one might guess). Since lower orbits are faster than higher ones spacing on the final orbit can be controlled by the timing of the final transfer.
- jessriedel 8y agoYou've given basically the right answer for changing phase within the same orbit, i.e., if you start with multiple satellites near each other on the same circular path, and you want to space them out evenly along that path. However, the Iridium Next satellites have enough fuel to change ('migrate') to the next orbital plane over. They save fuel by using some tricks involving the non-uniform nature of the Earth's gravitational field, which only works because the migration can be done slowly. There are 6 planes in the constellation and the satellites were delivered 10-at-a-time on 7 launches, plus 5 satellites on an 8th rideshare launch. There are 11 operational satellites in each plane (plus 9 spares distributed over the planes), and it's easy to see that migration is necessary to fill out all 11 slots in all 6 planes given those launches. More info: http://www.rod.sladen.org.uk/iridium.htm http://www.rod.sladen.org.uk/iridium.htm
- zamadatix 8y agoI recommend picking up Kerbal Space Program on a slow weekend some time. Turns these kinds of questions into fun game play experiences.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoNot surprisingly, for a long time (and to some extent even today) it is often highly classified. That is because the original use was for nuclear weapons which carried more than one warhead and could hit multiple targets (or one target really hard). That said, these days its somewhat standardized (see this brochure :https://www.moog.com/content/dam/moog/literature/Space_Defense/spaceliterature/structures/sais_payload_adapter_rev_0813.pdf https://www.moog.com/content/dam/moog/literature/Space_Defen...) Basically a kinetic mechanism, sometimes a spring, sometimes just gas (aka compressed air), is used to give each satellite a 'kick' when it is released. Once the satellite is unfolded and oriented it can use an on board thruster to move itself to the proper orbit.