Virginia Company Has Connected Mobile Phones Directly to Satellites (Source: Ars Technica)
A space startup says it has successfully demonstrated the ability to use ordinary, unmodified mobile telephones to connect to satellite Internet services. The Virginia-based company, Lynk, sent its "Shannon" satellite into orbit three months ago as part of a rideshare mission on a Falcon 9 rocket. After some initial tests, the company said "hundreds" of mobile phones in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Bahamas were able to connect with the satellite as it passed overhead, as if it were a virtual cell phone tower in space.
"Basically, our satellite looks to your cell phone like a standard cell tower," said Charles Miller, the co-founder and chief executive of Lynk. Satellite Internet is all the rage in the space and telecommunications industry, with companies such as SpaceX, OneWeb, Amazon, Telesat, and more launching or planning large constellations of satellites to deliver broadband Internet. But all of these services will require a terminal of sorts, perhaps akin to a DirecTV satellite dish, to send and receive signals to low Earth orbit.
The difference with Lynk, Miller says, is that with its 1 m × 1 m satellite there is no terminal needed, nor even software to download. To make it all work, Lynk had to solve a number of technical problems, Miller said. Chief among these was being able to send uplink signals from a mobile phone to a satellite through the "noise" of other phones. Another challenge was compensating for the huge amount of doppler shift between the satellite and mobile phone on the ground. (9/29)
<New satellites, but from the write up, two of ' a number of technical problems" were noise and doppler shift. No mention power requirements. Which then beggs the question which 'ordinary unmodified mobile phones' did they connect to - exisiting satelilte phones or common terrestrial cell phones?> |
