Earth Gateway Station 6

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.