On 3/6/22 1:10 PM, David P. Reed wrote:
Very interesting info about where current ground stations are, but of course Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv are close to some adjacent countries that already have Starlink
ground stations (didn't know they were up and running in Turkey).
Regarding ground-level repeating, the radio horizon is very short except in VHF where you can in principle bounce off the ionosphere. Don't join the Flat Earth
Society, the earth isn't very flat at all.
(yes, some small bands actually bend around the earth in the Troposhere, but bitrates feasible in that bandwidth is very poor. Maybe voice grade)
Microwave multihop links require LOS and except from mountaintop to mountaintop, it's hard to maintain them cheaply - Wall St uses microwaves between NYC and
Chicago, because the latency is much lower number of microseconds than direct fiber would be (little known fact about the difference between speed of light in
glass vs. air).
These technologies are "off the shelf" for fixed wireless deployment, but if I were trying to maintain or build a quick replacement for existing cables using
wireless, I suspect it would largely be too little, too late.
For email, and anything else that can be stored and forwarded, you should be able to zig-zag from ground to sky to ground,
but it would take specialized software setup on the ground intermediate hops (something like bittorrent and/or an email
proxy I guess), and it would require the sky to be able to hair-pin ground-to-ground. So, a bit of work, but hopefully is
software-only fix.
For instance: Ground-east-1 <-> sky-to-the-west <-> ground-middle <-> sky-more-to-the-west <-> internet-ground-station-to-the-west
And maybe it is not directly due west due to orbital mechanics, but I think you get the idea.
Latency would be in minutes or maybe hours, but that is still a lot better than nothing.
Thanks,
Ben