Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS Ground Station

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 184 posts

Re: AWS Ground Station

#81

Post by closeparen »

mirashii wrote: post #43
SkyMarshal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I worked at a company that with a fleet of microsatellites that also built and managed our own network of groundstations. The costs of groundstations can definitely add up. Scouting for locations with good RF properties takes a lot of long flights, weird dealings with customs (RF equipment is questioned heavily). Then you have to find a site to host it, maybe ask them to beef up their security, construction to suppor…

>maybe ask them to beef up their security

What's the threat model for a ground station? Interception? Sabotage? Hardware theft? Can you even sell these things on eBay?

Re: AWS Ground Station

#82

Post by closeparen »

wongarsu wrote: post #66
akiselev wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: http…

Hetzner's pricing is a reflection of the generally lower price level in Europe. Dedicated server providers with US datacenters do exist, but their pricing is much closer to Amazon's.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#84

Post by closeparen »

yongjik wrote: post #73
endymi0n wrote: post #22

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.

They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ > AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. (...)

I wanted a small-scale version of this for my personal photos, back when I realized that uploading a few hundred GB on my 5mbps down/0.5mbps up residential cable connection was going to take weeks.

(Ended up doing it from university, where I had symmetric 100mbit in my dorm room).

Re: AWS Ground Station

#85

Post by mopsi »

monocasa wrote: post #62
tomcam wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.democracy…

> On one hand leaking information that's only useful to geopolitical adversaries

What did he leak? From what I can tell, the photo merely confirmed what was already a reasonable educated guess.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#86

Post by ahsima1 »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #76
ahsima1 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, that's the bandwidth of an average mid-end SDR like LimeSDR(300$) or BladeRF(500$)

I have never heard of a LimeSDR putting out a 54Mhz wide signal for broadcast. Can you describe how you are configuring things?

Haven't worked with LimeSDR myself, but here's the paper that suggests that it's possible https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/119623/memor...

Re: AWS Ground Station

#87

Post by mdszy »

curiousgal wrote: post #80
mdszy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, shouldn't there be some sort of authentication step? The only barrier to communicating with satellites is the equipment?!

Not with the example given of NOAA satellites. Those simply broadcast data on regular intervals. If you had to authenticate, can you imagine a single satellite dealing with all the traffic of uplink/downlink required for authentication? It simply wouldn't work or maky any sense.

This is not true for all satellites, obviously. There are private ones that use encrypted communications, but weather satellites can be easily used if you have the proper antenna and equipment setup to do so.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#88

Post by p1mrx »

flicker-rate wrote: post #8

> To add satellites to your account, please email aws-groundstation@amazon.com with the NORAD ID, your FCC license information, and your customer account number and someone will contact you. Does anyone know how to get a NORAD ID?

They typically do walk-ins. Just look for the big metal door.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#89

Post by Lorin »

d_silin wrote: post #21

We also can offer you an actual satellite for rent, starting 2021. Have a look at https://www.exodusorbitals.com

Is "3U" the satellite's dimensions as if it's electronic rack equipment? hah.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#90

Post by mdszy »

garmaine wrote: post #70
mdszy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, not quite free. Still gotta buy the wire, other supporting antenna hardware, and RTL-SDR lol

But yes, absolutely.

Post reply on HN