Forum Discussion

MrBuster's avatar
MrBuster
Senior
5 years ago

Earth Gateway Station 6

 

I was thinking about the gateways and wondering what they look like.  Would it be one small dish nobody notices?  A really big dish like a radio telescope?  A row of dishes all aimed the same way?  Or would it be a dish antenna version of a late 19th century French battleship with guns of all sizes aimed in every imaginable direction?  Do the gateways have to be a minimum distance from airports?  Do they have to be in walking distance of a Taco Bell?

 

Why multiple dish antenna?  Multiple antenna might give the ability to send/receive signals in different frequency bands. Why a big dish antennae?  A big dish should give better reception.  I have noticed that bad weather over the gateway has to be worse than the weather I have to block the signal just by using WunderMap.  Anyway, in the universal language of science and mathematics a big dish means one thing: "Your flying saucer must be at least this big to attack the earth gateway station!"


So rather than playing 'Where's Waldo?' looking for surface to air missile sites and submarines in North Korea, I figured I would look around to see what I could spot that might be a HughesNet Earth Gateway.

 

 

Wow!  Yes, the Jeune École fad is over!  Looks like those dishes are aimed toward at least 3 satellites, just guessing by the shadows and angles on the dish antennae!  From some very old government "red tape" docs, it appears that not all gateways have the same size dishes as one has or had a really big dish.  Might be neat to look at that one.  I guess the sizes are determined by the frequency and weather conditions/humidity typical of the location.  I think higher frequencies require a bigger dish with bad weather--so if the site can only get high frequencies to use, then they may need a bigger dish if the location is more humid.  Perhaps somebody familiar with all this can chime in and answer the age old question "Do really big dish antenna attract big flying saucers?"

 

general discussion is not a support area
  • MarkJFine's avatar
    MarkJFine
    Professor
    5 years ago

    I always assumed the spot beams were combined in space into a single bidirectional path to the ground station. Kind of like a large addressable router for up to 8 or 9 different beams. If that's true, the ground station would only need one large dish (yes, larger diameter usually means more gain) per active satellite that it services, depending upon how redundant the systems are. I say 'assumed' but always based this on the number of hops you see in a traceroute before you got to the gateway provider.

     

    Having said all this, I just checked: Where there used to be three direcway hops, now there are only two for my gateway, which used to service both  Exchostar 17 and 19 (J1 and J2). Not sure that matters for your question. Just thought it to be an interesting change. Curious how this factors into what used to be a pretty secure double-NAT architecture.

    • MrBuster's avatar
      MrBuster
      Senior
      5 years ago

      I see in that old gov application for licenses that there are several frequency bands for both upload and download -- perhaps they have so many dishes not just for redundancy, but to split based on frequency band as well as upload/download?  I suspect this gateway shown here is serving not just J2, but also some older satellites -- anyway, I can see the aim is different on the dishes, but many dishes of different sizes appear to be aimed at the same thing.  I found some other gateways that had fewer dishes.

       

      Having redundancy is good -- getting a little water in a cable without redundancy would cause havoc for a lot of folks on several beams if everything went through a single dish, although I think I saw something about there being a backup gateway setup for each beam should a disaster take out a gateway.

       

      Do you remember when the last time you saw three hops?  Maybe it is connected with a gateway upgrade they did at some point?   The gateway upgrades earlier this year were fairly noticeable, so I was wondering if maybe what you saw was related to that?  I had not thought of logging a traceroute result every week or so to watch for things changing like that.

       

      By the way, what number for your IPGW do you see?  I was wondering if other customers see numbers outside of the ranges that I have been seeing since earlier this year -- of course you are a different beam and gateway, but I was curious if the number ranges differ by customer/plan etc.

       

       

      • MarkJFine's avatar
        MarkJFine
        Professor
        5 years ago

        It's quite possible the 2 vs. 3 hop thing took place during the upgrade. Can't remember the last time I did a traceroute.

         

        As far as the numbers go, I used to only see 1200 thru about 1205 or so. Since the upgrade I've been seeing 13xx and 14xx. I don't see many 13xx, but have noticed up to around 1412. I assume the code is abcc, but what a, b, or c mean could be anything. At one time that code used to be just three digits that we used to assume was somehow related to the outroute path.