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To: noel berge who wrote (6548)	12/16/1997 6:00:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 152472

OT - Noel, skystation certainly looks neat, but I would worry about the following: 1) Where are they getting the power? All that electronics is going to suck up power, and unlike a spacecraft they can't use solar panels since they will spend 12 hours in darkness every day. They mention some etherial 'power from the air', but I would want to know more before I invested. 2) On long duration balloon flights the biggest isssue is thermal effects (during the day the balloon heats up and wants to rise). This is commonly dealt with by using ballast, and sequentially leaking ballast then lifting agent, then ballast, ... . Alternatively you can let your balloon float, but I would imagine that causes problems with shrinking and expanding cells. Finally, you can compensate with props, but that would eat power. 3) What are the wind speeds like up there? Fighting the prevailing winds is going to eat up a lot of power. 4) Insurance - Who is going to want a multi-ton, unmanned balloon hanging over their densely populated cities? Having said all of that, it is a neat idea as the power requirements of electronics come down. But, I suspect that there a variety of technological issues to overcome. Clark

To: noel berge who wrote (6548)	12/16/1997 6:32:00 PM
From: jpbrody	Respond to of 152472

I just took a look at skystation and here's my comments/guesses. I'm certainly no expert, so maybe someone could point out what I'm missing. First of all, I would say that I thought the point of a cellular system is that you can reuse spectrum over and over. You can add capacity by subdividing cells. I thought the point of geostationay satelites was that you could see a very large portion of the Earth at once, so that you can relay a signal across most of the globe with one bounce. Having said that, it looks like they are building a cellular system with a very large cell size, and it isn't clear how they could subdivide to add capacity. They only have 600 MHz of spectrum allocated (at 47 GHz) (300 MHz uplink and 300 MHz downlink), and they are talking about customers using 5Mbps each. I'd estimate that they could handle no more than 1,000 simultaneous customers (maybe 10,000 paying customers) per platform. That just doesn't seem like a very large number over an entire city. Maybe their long term goal is to build smaller cells on the ground and ditch the platforms once they build up the customer base. Jim