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?"
The ranges on your IPGW seem the same as mine then 1201-1204, 1305-1308, 1409-1412
I was hoping to hear from someone that sees different ranges -- I thought maybe they stuck in several banks of 12 IPGW, but gave each customer access to only 12, but so far nobody has said they have seen any number other than the above. I saw a picture online in a HughesNet brochure of some sort that showed rack servers with a pair of network cards(?) apiece as hardware that might represent what is behind an IPGW number.
I have been looking for the J2 gateways to get images of what they look like. Some are obvious and have a huge number of dishes, others might just be a single big dish sitting in some parking lot. The ones with a single smaller dish are the hardest to find -- and I am not sure they are actually a gateway.
I think I was mistaken about size -- the gateway above (CHY) seems to have as 13.2m(?) dish plus that big weird thing north of the the dishes whatever that is. Whatever that is, GIL has two of them plus a bunch of the 13.1 or 13.2m dishes. The NLV gateway also has a huge number of dish antenna all over and it is handily labeled by Google as "Hughes Network Systems" so I think it is safe to say that gateway is found.
Anybody find other sites? I am tired out searching for OMA -- I could not find a dish bigger than 4m, and it was a single dish that I suspect belongs to somebody else.
Here are the ones I saw with BIG dishes:
CHY -- sorry, in this pic I cut off the big weird thing at the top:
GIL -- scads of dish antenna willy nilly with two of those weird things -- anybody know what they are?
NLV is identified on Google maps -- that makes it easy!
Let me know if you want to see some of the pics that show only a single lonely/small dish -- not sure they are really gateways.
Yeah, these are all J2 / Echostar 19 gateways -- I could get the list readily enough from that CCF file along with the beams they cover, but the listed Echostar 17 names are more cryptic. GWalk had an image he made years ago that shows J1 / Echostar 17 gateways along with beams. I am not sure how he knew.
That satbeams site you showed is very handy for locating these by the way -- I would go to the gateway beams, find the center, then search that location on Google maps near the middle. In most cases I could find something in a few minutes. The ones shown here had obvious names on the map related to Hughes/Echostar and all had 13.2m dishes as can be seen by the distance measure. The other sites I found had fewer and smaller dishes.
For example, this may be ALB. Notice the big dish is only 8.2m (or 8.1m?) and there are fewer here.
Not sure why some gateways are so beefy -- BIL and MIS where shown on Google maps with construction by them, so maybe they are bigger now....
Maybe this is the OMA gateway? I could not find anything like many of the gateways, but here is a 13.2m (13.1m ?) dish in the middle of a parking lot 15 miles from what looked like the gateway beam center -- anybody know if this is it? It is crazy far from where I started searching.... I did not see any other big dish antenna like this around Omaha over 4m, so this is as good as I can find without going crazy. Anybody know if this is it? Is that power lines running next to it?
Sure it could be something else, but it appears to be a 13.2m dish which is what was listed in the license application for the OMA gateway. I was searching for this one because I thought such a big dish would be easy to find compared to the ones with smaller dish antenna.
Of course, it occurs to me that maybe all gateways now have this size dish, just they may not be able to be located at the normal site because of restrictions like being too close to airports. The footnote in the application made it seem as if pilots might crash into them on takeoff or something based on comment about FAA notification which made me snicker a bit -- I am not sure why the wording of the footnote made me think that.
*images from Wikipedia and HughesNet advertisement page.
