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I 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?
"You can connect with any satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) operating in X-band and S-band frequencies, including: S-band uplink and downlink, X-band narrowband and wideband downlink."
This 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.
What’s unclear to me is, if any company can run their own satellite fleet, even micro ones, can they really not afford to run their own ground stations too? What’s the target customer profile of this service exactly?
This 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.
What’s unclear to me is, if any company can run their own satellite fleet, even micro ones, can they really not afford to run their own ground stations too? What’s the target customer profile of this service exactly?
The core competency of a business you describe is building, launching and maintaining satellites. On-ground network infrastructure, computing hardware, data processing, machine learning etc. is something AWS is a lot more familiar with.
I wonder if this is related to Amazons Project Kuiper satellite broadband constellation, would make sense for them to be building out their ground station capabilities.
Could this be used for downlink only? For example, to pull down NOAA satellite data?
This 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.
S-band and beyond will cost you more, but a fully-featured VHF/UHF/S-band one from a proper vendor will be under $100K.
X-band, yeah... But not that many cubesats have X-band transceivers anyway.
This 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 would say "it depends", when it comes to cost. You can build your own grown station for UHF/VHF bands at under $1000. S-band and beyond will cost you more, but a fully-featured VHF/UHF/S-band one from a proper vendor will be under $100K. X-band, yeah... But not that many cubesats have X-band transceivers anyway.
What the Amazon website doesn't cover is:
- download guarantee. They rent you the antenna, they don't commit to a successful reception (and consequent refund if it fails)
- link status report (needed for a positive confirmation of successful reception.) This is basically a series of SNR measurements
- competition with other users of the same antenna: first-come first served? Maybe your spacecraft needs more storage to save the downlink data if the Amazon antenna is busy.
And of course they don't talk about the competition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say "it depends", when it comes to cost. You can build your own grown station for UHF/VHF bands at under $1000. S-band and beyond will cost you more, but a fully-featured VHF/UHF/S-band one from a proper vendor will be under $100K. X-band, yeah... But not that many cubesats have X-band transceivers anyway.
This is the classic "make or buy" decision. You can rent by the minute, or own your own. What the Amazon website doesn't cover is: - download guarantee. They rent you the antenna, they don't commit to a successful reception (and consequent refund if it fails) - link status report (needed for a positive confirmation of successful reception.) This is basically a series of SNR measurements - competition with other users…