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?...
Forum Discussion
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.
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.
