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I would say "it depends", when it comes to cost. You can build your own grown station for UHF/VHF bands at under $1000. S-band and beyond will cost you more, b
by d_silin 7y ago
I would say "it depends", when it comes to cost. You can build your own grown station for UHF/VHF bands at under $1000.
S-band and beyond will cost you more, but a fully-featured VHF/UHF/S-band one from a proper vendor will be under $100K.
X-band, yeah... But not that many cubesats have X-band transceivers anyway.
- bitminer 7y agoThis is the classic "make or buy" decision. You can rent by the minute, or own your own. What the Amazon website doesn't cover is: - download guarantee. They rent you the antenna, they don't commit to a successful reception (and consequent refund if it fails) - link status report (needed for a positive confirmation of successful reception.) This is basically a series of SNR measurements - competition with other users of the same antenna: first-come first served? Maybe your spacecraft needs more storage to save the downlink data if the Amazon antenna is busy. And of course they don't talk about the competition.
- d_silin 7y agoYes, I agree. Comes with probably the same caveats as all other Amazon services.
- namibj 7y agoX band reception isn't expensive. LNB + dish is a combination that handles a large part of the X band for <100$. I'm not sure how expensive an X-band uplink is, but I think some satellite internet providers used them, in which case they are also likely <1000$. And it's normally better to just have more redundancy instead of higher individual uptime, at least as long as space, weight and power are not an issue (i.e., on the ground).