At 9:08 PM -0700 10/10/06, Greg D. wrote:
- I was also excited by what I heard about the Text Messaging
proposal. Has anybody approached (or future tense, could anyone approach) Kenwood for a re-program of their TH-D7?
It will take a lot more than reprogramming. The Kenwood radios contain the wrong kind of modem, and it's implemented in hardware (the same on both the HT and the mobile). It will take a rather complete redesign of the unit to work on Eagle's text messaging mode.
In any case, it would be premature to approach manufacturers. The parameters aren't fixed yet, and need to be subjected to peer review, implementation, and testing before they can be.
I would not expect big commercial manufacturers like Kenwood to be involved in the first round of hardware, any more than they were involved in making packet TNC's before TAPR productized and popularized them. And a fully-integrated radio/TNC like the TH-D7 and TM-D700 was still longer in coming. So, don't hold your breath.
- What I thought I heard at the Symposium was that we wouldn't
need such a massive station to work Eagle's traditional UV transponder.
The U/V transponder isn't all that different from the ones we've flown before on high orbits. The size of the spacecraft constrains the antenna designs that are possible at VHF and UHF. The antenna systems haven't really been designed yet for the new spaceframe, but the example drawing showed three dipoles on VHF and a few patches for UHF. Those are not killer antennas, and there are no magical modulation or coding tricks available for SSB and CW users.
It might be possible to allocate more power to the downlink than before. Or maybe not; we do want to run the analog and digital payloads simultaneously (all the time) and the power budget hasn't been finalized. I believe the current plan is to run more power than before, but not spectacularly so.
This not being Star Trek, we can't improve the uplink by shunting warp power to the receivers. The SDX implementation technology will help on the uplink by solving the alligator problem once and for all, but it will still be necessary to use enough power+gain on the ground to close the link to the distant spacecraft with its compromise antennas.
I'll leave the forecasting of exact ground station requirements to those who have studied the link budgets. And then I will take the results with a grain of salt. I hope it will be better than before. But what's really better than before is the ACP (Advanced Communication Package, that is, the digital stuff), and people who don't want to put up large antennas should really be looking forward to that rather than the U/V transponder.
In my opinion.
73 -Paul kb5mu@amsat.org