Specs of traditional downlink

Capacity

Bandwidth

The bandwidth is assumed to be $240\mathrm{MHz}$ as this is equivalent to 1 channel in the Ku band used by Starlink.

SNR

SNR is assumed to be between $5-15\mathrm{dB}$ for a small satellite mission with a relativley small grounstation.

Data Generation Capacity

To estimate the capacity of a traditional downlink, we can use the Shannon-Hartley theorem: $C=B{\log }_2(1+\frac{S}{N})$ where:

• $C$ is the channel capacity in bits per second
• $B$ is the bandwidth in Hz
• $\frac{S}{N}$ is the signal to noise ratio

For different orbits and channel snr:

Calculations can be found in metrics.ipynb

Price

Commercial ground station solutions:

• AWS Ground Station
• KSATlite - KSAT - Kongsberg Satellite Services

The price of a traditional downlink is complicated to find an exact number for. The price of this can be split into two parts:

• Establishing costs
• Maintenance costs

Establishing costs

This includes the costs of the hardware of the ground station, but also all the labour hours associated with setting up the hardware.

Maintenance costs

This includes the labour hours of maintaining the hardware, such as making sure the antenna move as intended by keeping them clean and free of rust and other debris.

Resilience