Re: [Starlink] Starlink deplyment in Ukraine

[Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>]

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

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com