The point here is to open this up to people who won't, and would have more interference problems, since they live in denser areas and can't put up big dishes with lots of directional gain.
San Mateo has almost a million people in a 12 mile radius. I get no little inteference in the lower S band, and only a very small amount of popping (that my DSP removes completely) in the upper S band. So I personally need more convincing that this isn't a problem. At worse we may have to convince our members to buy better downconverters or add on notch filters so that their wideband downconverters don't suck up noise from outside the band. But telling people to get a filter isn't a big inconvenience. It's been done before.
Only the upper S-band is a satellite band. If you get "pops" in a narrowband receiver, chances are that the noise is bad enough to make problems for a wideband receiver trying to receive signals at the background noise level. You can't use a notch filter if the interference is wideband and is on the wideband channel you are trying to receive.
3 - Could you justify putting up an X million dollar satellite that uses a band which is questionable at best, just because some complainers who don't actually volunteer to do anything say that it works for them?
I think this is a very good question - so if that is the argument, why would you put up a mode U/V transponder? It's as usable as mud in a gas tank.
If it were up to me, we wouldn't....
4 - Why should we have to justify why we're not using a band?
There are several reasons. The first is because we have spectrum allocated there, and if we don't use it we simply lose it. In the future we may need to rely upon it.
What band aren't we using? We're using S-band for uplink instead of downlink, bet we're still using it. How does that cause us to lose spectrum?
The other reason is because the people who bought into the technology 5-10 years ago have an investment that hasn't yet been fully realized. I don't want to go down the road questioning the judgement of people who told our customer base to go down the road, but if it was flawed we haven't told people we are sorry. It's also why none of the commercial broadcasters cut off analog TV transmissions when the FCC set the 2006 deadline. People hang on to technology.
As we agreed at the SD meeting, we are looking at providing _services_ and the best way to do that, not how to best make use of old hardware, which wouldn't be usable anyway.
I wasn't invited to that meeting, but can you tell me why you don't think it wouldn't be usable? I think that is a very bad assumption.
It wouldn't be usable, not because of interference. it wouldn't be usable because this is a wideband digital system, not the kind of thing where you just hook a downconverter up to your Icom. You need special hardware all the way from the antenna to the backend.
Matt