Sadly, the new Lantern will no longer cost $165. Our backers will be getting an OUTSTANDING discount for a really unique satellite terminal. We expect the price of the future version of Lantern to drop to that price, but that is a couple years away. Satcomm is expensive
We will be delivering content between 1525 MHz and 1559 MHz. A simple patch antenna, with gain of about 8 dBi should suffice, but youâll need a specialized (but still free) software demodulator to turn the signal into actual content.
The cubesats will be transmitting around 403 MHz.
The cubesats will have about 8W of power available. Itâs a 1U satellite, so the only payload is the UHF radio.
Since we want to deliver more than just 10MB of content, we had to switch to a proprietary design, so the connector will not be exposed. But for a software-based receiver, you can add any kind of antenna to, similar to how you work with an RTL dongle.
The RTL can pick up L-band, but it get really hot and unstable above 1 GHz. You should be fine for the receiving the cubesats, though.
Sadly too, Lighthouse with Version 2.0.000 software is receiving data from Galaxy 19, but not displaying it in the Librarian either. Details sent to Branko by e mail. Ken
If i buy a lighthouse now will I be able to connect a smaller antenna or different antenna in the near future and pick up the 10mb a day feed that the Outernet Lantern will be receiving?
If so I will not wait for a Lantern but buy a Lighthouse today and start playing with a large C Band antenna and when the Mobile Lantern service starts I will change over to a smaller mobile antenna and pick up the 10 MB feed as I go to different places.
Iâm definitely not an expert on radio so @syed will fill you in on the details. I think the new Lantern will only be L-band (but, as I said, Iâm not dealing with that part of the product so Iâm not sure).
You assumed correctly that Lighthouse receives Ku and C band, through an LNB. Without getting too technical, Lighthouse actually demodulates at L-band, because that is what an LNB downconverts to. But Iâve probably only confused you with that additional piece of information, so to clarify, Lighthouse receives DVB-S2.
Lanternâs design has shifted a bit, but has now stabilized to L-band. Specifically, 1525 MHz - 1559 MHz. The satellites in use are from LightSquared and Thuraya (Thuraya-2 and Thuraya-3).
The cubesats will be transmitting over UHF, specifically 401 MHz. The receiver for those signals will be an RTL-dongle, which can be obtained for about $10.
Yes, thatâs correct. All of those tv dongles use the same demodulator chip from Realtek. For SDR applications, the chip is not actually used as a demodulator, but as an analog to digital converter with a USB interface. The digital bits are then sent to the processor (whatever the dongle is plugged into) for decoding into files.
As a sometimes mobile user the Lantern and cube sat options have a lot of appeal.
I assume the Lantern will use Clark Belt Geostationary Satellites to beam down a L Band signal that can be picked up 24 hrs a day for those in the satellite footprint.
The data will came on a 15xx Mhz L Band and be around 10mb? a day of data to the Solar powered lanterns.
The cubesats on the other hand will be a much lower orbit and not geostationary. So the satellite will be closer to earth and have a smaller transmission footprint and be moving across the earth.
Here in the Philippines we get the International space station a couple of times a day. The ability to get a clear radio receive from the ISS VHF and UHF transmitters is limited to a few minutes of the satellite approaching and a few minutes after it goes overhead.
Extrapolating that to 3 Cubesats on similar orbits and I would ball park summarize we could get possibly a total 2 to 3 hours a day of cubesat UHF data transmissions. What data rate are you expecting into The RTL-SDR receivers?.
The data should be at least 20MB a dayâthat is one of the benefits of our new partnership. Yes, the cubesats will be at an altitude of about 500km. We expect about 7 minutes of contact time with each pass. I would say that two hours per day is being generous. The radios that Clyde Space are using have a target data rate of 9600 bps.
My guess would be that NADIR passes, when the satellite is directly overhead of the target, would be around 7 minutes, but OFF-NADIR passes, when the satellite passes out on the horizon, would be less than 7 minutes. To visualize, draw a circle, then draw a line through the middle of the circle, and draw a line out closer to the edge of the circle. You can see that the line on the edge of the circle is shorter.
Unless youâre only going to use the NADIR passes, which lessens your passes per day, the software will need to be able to handle data increments as low as about 2 minutes.
If you run sun synchronous to keep your solar cells powered, youâll get two NADIR passes per day per satellite, and 8 off NADIR passes per day per satellite. (One off by a single pass and one off by 2 passes both to the east and west). As a rough guess, that would mean:
72 + 44 + 4*2 = 14+16+8 = 38 minutes per day per satellite
