Having just finished reading this story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22718330 the author might want to check out setting up several AWS ground stations. I suspect the cost could be out-of-this-world.
AWS Ground Station
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Re: AWS Ground Station
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you're not going to be able to make out a house from 100x farther away either. Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees, we know that Block 4 KH-11 satellites have a 10cm/pixel about standard (they're in an elliptical orbit, but they use which ever is closest at the time). So we're looking at a 10M/pixel in geostationary orbit, assuming you can get the same optics that NROL was shipping up as l…
> Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees If there’s one thing I hate about that guy, it’s his being the most transparent presidency in history.
His actions are sort of the worst of both worlds here. On one hand leaking information that's only useful to geopolitical adversaries (probably because he didn't understand the implications of tweeting stuff like that), and on the other hand being a new bar for destruction of public records when it comes to decisions made by the administration (somehow even beating out the Obama administration).
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/6/national_archives_reco...
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filin...
It'd be a huge stretch to call it "the most transparent presidency in history".
Re: AWS Ground Station
#63This was sufficiently close in timing that I wasn't sure for a moment whether this was just an early caught April Fools. Then again, the more I think about it, the more this makes sense. Satellite business is hard and capital intensive enough as it is, for starters in the micro-satellite business it would be absolutely prohibitive to run their own hardware just to receive those signals.
> ... I wasn't sure for a moment whether this was just an early caught April Fools.
Nope, this was actually announced [0] about 18 months ago.
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[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-a...
Re: AWS Ground Station
#64Previously discussed on HN (Nov 27, 2018):
Re: AWS Ground Station
#65I recall looking at this a while ago, but I couldn't seem to find what kind of RF hardware amazon is using, is there any information on that?
They have some information about the frequencies stuffed at the bottom of their FAQs. One omission that bugs me is that they don't tell you the location of the ground stations, which can be a dealbreaker for whether or not this is effective
Re: AWS Ground Station
#66This was sufficiently close in timing that I wasn't sure for a moment whether this was just an early caught April Fools. Then again, the more I think about it, the more this makes sense. Satellite business is hard and capital intensive enough as it is, for starters in the micro-satellite business it would be absolutely prohibitive to run their own hardware just to receive those signals.
I don't get how this helps. For startups/individuals, AWS eliminated all capex expenditures except for a single user's computer, which can be had for orders of magnitude cheaper than server hardware, literally. The cost of a cheap but powerful enough laptop or tablet plus keyboard is under $200 now. Unless you literally do everything by hand (which is a niche, but a tiny one), the cubesat is still going to cost at le…
> AWS eliminated all capex expenditures
You were always able to just rent servers running in someone else's data center.
AWS as we know it launched in 2006, [1] is Hetzner's homepage from 2001 offering dedicated servers for $125/month + $125 setup fee. By 2005 [2] you can get a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 1 GB RAM and 350GB traffic for 39€/month.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20010813053224/http://www.hetzne...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20050507034045/http://www.hetzne...
Re: AWS Ground Station
#67Thank god I now have an easy way to communicate with all my satellites.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#68I thought this was an April fools joke once I clicked on the link. The bandwidth they are operation on (54 MHz) is ridiculous though! Truly sci-fi-ish stuff going on here. Also, did Amazon build this from scratch or did they acquire a company that had the basic infra for this kind of stuff?
Not really, that's the bandwidth of an average mid-end SDR like LimeSDR(300$) or BladeRF(500$)
Re: AWS Ground Station
#69Thank god I now have an easy way to communicate with all my satellites.
You joke. But maybe you’ve never considered what satellite data applications you could have written because it wasn’t easy to do in the past?
Re: AWS Ground Station
#70Could this be used for downlink only? For example, to pull down NOAA satellite data?
I'm like 90% sure it would be cheaper to just build your own antenna and an RTL-SDR setup to do that sort of thing yourself. There's no way it's cost effective for that.
I’m 100% sure. You can’t beat free.