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
Not sure if it helps, but none of those are used as a groundstation for Echostar 17 (J1). Based on some old info gleaned from the installation data (may have changed), CHY handles 5 spot beams, GIL 7, and NLV only 3. All three service Echostar 19 (J2). Since all are not pointed at one azimuth, it's clear that more than just J2 is being pointed at. Makes sense to me because this can't possibly be the only thing that they do... I'm just thinking of the overhead and staffing costs for those sites, which must be incredible.
Another thought... some of those dishes that are aimed nearly horizontal can't possibly be used for geostationary satellites. Even Wyoming would have a takeoff azimuth to something at the equator. Terrestrial short-range microwave, maybe?
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?
Lots of Air Force contractor support in Belleview for Offutt. Could be anything, really.
Edit: Thought that looked familiar. It's only a couple of blocks up from what used to be my divison HQ at Northrop.
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.
