Sophisticated Commercial Satellite Set For Launch

[zavvy]

<b>Sophisticated Commercial Satellite Set For Launch</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />One of the world's most sophisticated commercial communication satellites is in preparation for launch by its owner, Inmarsat.<br /><br />The Inmarsat 4 family of satellites aims to be 100 times more powerful than its existing generation of communications spacecraft, the company says.<br /><br />It will ship its first Inmarsat 4 satellite from Toulouse, France to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, US, on 5 February. The satellite is to launch on an Atlas 5 rocket on 10 March 2005. This will be the first of three Inmarsat 4 craft. <br /><br />EADS Space, parent company of EADS Astrium - which built the satellite - says the new satellite is more advanced than previous generations as it can focus transmitting data into narrow beams onto Earth and has more many more communication channels than previous systems.<br /><br />"In the past, when a signal was sent up to one of the satellites, they just squirted the signal down to the whole visible surface of the Earth to be picked up by receivers on the ground," explains Alistair Scott, spokesman for EADS Space. "But that system is limited by the number of frequencies available in the region of the Earth-based receiver."<br /><br />No interference<br />With Inmarsat 4, if a laptop wanted to connect with another computer for example, it would first connect with the satellite and its ground systems would discover the location of the target computer using GPS. The satellite will then aim a narrow spot-beam, measuring about 150 kilometres in diameter, at the target computer. This means that, as little as about 200 kilometres away, users can use the same frequency without interference. The Inmarsat 4 has 228 of these narrow spot-beams.<br /><br />However, this is not the first use of this technology. Another satellite company called Thuraya, based in the United Arab Emirates, als

 

[vogon13]

Directv and Dish using spotbeam technology to increase number of cities with local channel coverage. Suspect their spots are pretty big, does anyone have figure? If spot beams get small enough, then there is enough bandwidth to start thinking about high definition local channels. Hope this Inmarsat 4 is raising the bar on this technology and Hughes feels compelled to out compete them.<br /><br /><br /><br />I just want to be your everything<br />A. Gibb <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#ff0000"><strong>TPTB went to Dallas and all I got was Plucked !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#339966"><strong>So many people, so few recipes !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#0000ff"><strong>Let's clean up this stinkhole !!</strong></font> </p> </div>