0 Persons are tagged with #satellite

#satellite

danie10@squeet.me
Danie

First time a satellite operator and a wireless carrier have received FCC authorization for a Direct-To-Cell service

Rear of a smartphone. In the background is a view of the night sky with a satellite in orbit.
Satellite connectivity on smartphones can be an incredibly important safety feature, and both phone makers and carriers are working to expand its availability. Now, Starlink’s direct-to-cell service that will be used by T-Mobile now has FCC approval.

The big promise of direct-to-cell satellite service is that you will be able to connect to a satellite just like you currently connect to a cell tower, with your current smartphone, whenever you find yourself in a dead spot. It’s like putting a cell tower in space that you can access at all times.

So, this is actually a huge event. Any ordinary cellphone user, stuck in some rural area (or at sea) where these satellites have coverage, could establish communications as if there was a cellphone tower in range.

It will be very interesting to see how these pan out in terms of more congested areas, and how operating costs compare. I’m thinking too here of some of the extreme electricity load shedding that South Africa experienced, where cell towers had no grid power for up to 6 hours at a time. South African operators have also had very expensive backup batteries being stolen on a regular basis from their terrestrial sites.

When one factors all this in, how do a few satellite units compare? Even for rural communications, due to the reach of the towers, how many towers and interconnectivity infrastructure are required to cover a 200 square kilometre area vs by satellite?

See howtogeek.com/starlink-direct-…
#Blog, #communications, #satellite, #technology

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waynerad@diasp.org
Wayne Radinsky

"If you had any idea that satellite connectivity isn't a key part of Apple's strategy, well, the company's satellite partner Globalstar has disclosed changes to its deal with Apple, including a new influx of $1.1 billion from Apple tied to capital improvements, and $400 million in equity, which gives Apple a 20-percent stake in the company."

"Apple's been offering satellite connectivity since the introduction of the iPhone 14 line in 2022, which debuted with the Emergency SOS via Satellite feature."

Apple sinks $1.1 billion into Globalstar's satellite network, takes ownership stake

#solidstatelife #satellite #satellitecommunications #apple

Apple sinks $1.1 billion into Globalstar’s satellite network, takes ownership stake

If you had any idea that satellite connectivity isn’t a key part of Apple’s strategy, well, the company’s satellite partner Globalstar has disclosed changes to its deal with Apple…

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anonymiss@despora.de
anonymiss

Constraining #Ocean and Ice Shell Thickness on #Miranda from #Surface Geological Structures and Stress Modeling

Source: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ad77d7

Images from the #Voyager 2 mission revealed the small Uranian #satellite Miranda to be a complex, dynamic world. This is exemplified by signs of recent geological activity, including an extensive fault system and the mysterious coronae. This has led to speculation that Miranda may have been tectonically active within the geologically recent past and could have hosted a subsurface #liquid water ocean at the time. In this work, we aim to constrain the thickness ranges for the ice shell and potential subsurface ocean on Miranda.

#water #news #science #space #exploration

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waynerad@diasp.org
Wayne Radinsky

"3GPP Release-18 Physical Layer Enhancements for IoT-NTN".

"The advent of mega satellite constellations has paved the way for bringing cellular connectivity to mobile broadband as well as Internet of Things (IoT) devices in unconnected or remote regions via satellites, thus complementing the terrestrial cellular coverage. With this motivation, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduced Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) support for IoT technologies including Long-Term Evolution (LTE) for Machine-Type Communications (LTE-MTC) and Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) in Release-17, which are collectively known as IoT-NTN. Release-17 IoT-NTN focused on only the essential changes to the existing IoT specification to enable IoT operation in satellite scenarios."

So in case you didn't follow the techspeak, what this is about is being able to have electronic devices in the most remote parts of the world, and as long as they have electric power, they can get on the internet and transmit data and receive data by communicating through satellites. They need particular electronic circuits that speak what have become known as "internet of things" (IoT) protocols -- protocols originally designed to carry internet protocol (TCP/IP) over low power and low bandwidth radio links.

Here we find an organization that develops standards for terrestrial cellular phone networks (3GPP) getting in on the act and developing standards for this internet of things using satellites, which they call IoT-NTN ("NTN" for "non-terrestrial networks").

When you run IoT communication over cellular networks (before getting to satellites -- regular cellular networks), that goes by the name "LTE-MTC", which as you see above, stands for "Long-Term Evolution Machine Type Communication". Don't ask me how cellular network standards came to be called "Long-Term Evolution", but that's what they're called. Tack on "Machine Type Communication" and now you're talking about machine-to-machine instead of human-to-human communication. How does this have to be modified to get it to work through satellites? That's what 3GPP's Release-17 answers. But this is Release-18.

Finishing out the abstract:

"IoT-NTN was further evolved in Release-18 and several performance enhancements were introduced. In this article, an overview of the Release-18 physical layer enhancements for IoT-NTN is provided. Specifically, a new feature related to disabling Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) feedback is described which helps mitigate the impact of HARQ stalling on throughput. Enhancements related to improving Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) operation are also discussed that enable the user equipment (UE) to maintain its uplink (UL) synchronization if its GNSS position becomes invalid during an ongoing connection. In addition, the performance evaluation of IoT-NTN technologies is presented in the context of International Mobile Telecommunications-2020 (IMT-2020) satellite performance requirements related to connection density."

So Release-17 came out in 2021, and Release-18 just came out, and Release-18 ties down some loose ends from Release-17. If you're wondering if "Global Navigation Satellite System" (GNSS) refers to the GPS system, the answer is... yes, but GNSS is actually a generic term for all GPS-type systems -- the US system is called GPS, Russia has a system called GLONASS (from "Globalnaya Navigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema"), China has a system called BeiDou, and the European Union has a system called Galileo. Japan has a system called the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), but rather than function as its own independent system, it's just a 4-satellite system that supplements the US GPS system around Japan.

Another loose end is HARQ, which stands for Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest. HARQ is a combination of an error-correction protocol and a system for requesting messages get repeated. With error-correction codes, additional bits are added to messages to enable errors to be detected and corrected -- within limits. If there are too many errors, however, the error-correction system gives up and the system requests the whole message be repeated. The "hybrid" part of "HARQ" is about how the HARQ system is a hybrid system that handles both -- error correction and message repeating.

The paper is paywalled, so I had to go searching on the internet to find out more. See below.

3GPP Release-18 Physical Layer Enhancements for IoT-NTN

#solidstatelife #communication #cellular #satellite #gps #iot #iotntn

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anonymiss@despora.de
anonymiss

#Mystery of #MH370 Solved by #Science

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mystery-mh370-solved-science-vincent-lyne-46s3c/

This work changes the narrative of MH370’s -#disappearance from one of no-blame, fuel-starvation at the 7th arc, high-speed dive, to a #mastermind pilot almost executing an incredible perfect-disappearance in the Southern Indian #Ocean. In fact, it would have worked were it not for MH370 ploughing its right wing through a wave, and the discovery of the regular interrogation #satellite communications by Inmarsat—a brilliant discovery also announced in the Journal of #Navigation.

#news #crash #disaster #conspiracy

Mystery of MH370 Solved by Science

After over two years “Under Review”, I am pleased to announce that the manuscript “Final Two Communications from MH370 Suggests Controlled Eastward Descent” has been accepted by the Journal of Navigation (JN). On behalf of those waiting...

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