AWS Ground Station
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AWS Ground Station
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Re: AWS Ground Station
#2I have been curious about this service for a while but the landing page is very scant on technical details about how it actually works.
- Is it an EC2 instance with an SDR attached? What’s the software setup? Is it compatible with GNUradio?
- What are the the antenna RX gain(s)?
- What TX power can be used?
Edit: I found this presentation [1] which has some additional details. It does seem to be SDR based but I can’t find public information about many of the parts/interfaces in the architecture diagrams.
Edit 2: There are a few more breadcrumbs of information on the AWS documentation site [2]. It sounds like the EC2 instance receives VITA-49 (?) packets from the RF front end and you need special software to process them.
[1] https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2019/REPEAT_1_Enabl...
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ground-station/latest/ug/install...
Re: AWS Ground Station
#3Holy wow, it never occurred to me that there were enough organizations launching satellites to warrant creating a managed service to support it.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#4A big part of this service is AWS helping you navigate the paperwork minefield that is involved with beaming data down from space. You need agreements with the FCC equivalent in all the countries that you’ll be beaming data down to. After that you’re basically renting fractional time on Amazon’s equipment for sending and receiving data via a global network of ground stations.
On the space portion, companies often rent a partial payload on other satellites with a timeshare agreement for booting up their bits and using the antennas to beam things down/up.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#5This was released by AWS in 2018 with a lot of discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546272
In contrast, Azure's orbital data is in "preview" in 2021 with little discussion:
Re: AWS Ground Station
#6Holy wow, it never occurred to me that there were enough organizations launching satellites to warrant creating a managed service to support it.
There isn't. This is some VP's pet project .
Re: AWS Ground Station
#7Holy wow, it never occurred to me that there were enough organizations launching satellites to warrant creating a managed service to support it.
There isn't. This is some VP's pet project .
There's a lot of those around. For a sample, look at everything with "Deep" in its name (like AWS DeepCompose, DeepLens, and DeepRacer).
Re: AWS Ground Station
#8A big part of this service is AWS helping you navigate the paperwork minefield that is involved with beaming data down from space. You need agreements with the FCC equivalent in all the countries that you’ll be beaming data down to. After that you’re basically renting fractional time on Amazon’s equipment for sending and receiving data via a global network of ground stations. On the space portion, companies often ren…
Why do I need the agreemnent? I would have figured that is what is being offered here, no? Like AWS Globlal Beaming Inc would have done all that and I would just be beaming data under their existing agreement and just complying, no?
Re: AWS Ground Station
#9A big part of this service is AWS helping you navigate the paperwork minefield that is involved with beaming data down from space. You need agreements with the FCC equivalent in all the countries that you’ll be beaming data down to. After that you’re basically renting fractional time on Amazon’s equipment for sending and receiving data via a global network of ground stations. On the space portion, companies often ren…
Why do I need the agreemnent? I would have figured that is what is being offered here, no? Like AWS Globlal Beaming Inc would have done all that and I would just be beaming data under their existing agreement and just complying, no?
In my experience the communications related paperwork is a prerequisite for the paperwork to actually launch your satellite. Every single satellite (or constellation of identical satellites) has to have its own “internationally coordinated” set of paperwork, some of which may block you getting the information Amazon needs (depending on the regulatory environment of your country). The radio regulations are a real headache and from my own experience laser based communications can’t get here soon enough.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#10As an individual who certainly doesn't have any satellites in orbit and really doesn't have any space-specific skills beyond KSP, but who has enough money to blow on $10/minute fees, is there anything I could do with this?
Not illegal or nefarious things either, but could I do something like listen in on data being transmitted down by an existing satellite (say something like Hubble or Landsat that will eventually result in public data anyway)?