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Iridium May Have To Reinvent Itself Again

Posted by Hemos on from the return-of-the-satellites dept.

prgrmr writes "The Washington Post has this article on the latest wrinkle in the Iridium saga. There may be a conflict between new competition and existing contractual obligations for putting up the next generation of sattelites. This could become a milestone for making the service more ubiquitous, or the millstone that finally sinks it."

5 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Iridium by tramm · · Score: 3, Informative
    totallygeek wrote:
    Interesting enough if anyone cares, iridium the element was discovered when dissolving platnum using aqua regia (acid).
    Iridium has an atomic number of 77, which is how many satellites were in the Iridium(tm) initial design. It was later reduced to only 66 birds, but the name Dysprosium doesn't have the same ring.
    --
    -- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
  2. It's spelled 'satellite' by essell · · Score: 3, Informative

    I saw it spelled two different ways in the threads here, but this is the correct spelling.

    --
    i swear my userid used to be lower.
  3. Re:Iridium Flares by PK_ERTW · · Score: 2, Informative
    Sorry, I didn't have the site handy before. Go to Heavens Above for a really good free resource on finding the flares. you don't need to register to get good results, just head through the "select" your location link.

    For example, I easily got these results for where I often go camping.

    pk

    --
    Engineers arn't boring people, we just get excited about boring things.
  4. Re:I hope they don't put satellites in polar orbit by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is one of the things you learn as an amateur radio operator (because you get the chance to actually play around with real satellites) - you can have an eliptical orbit around the equator (phase 3), but a lot of the time the satellite can be as far as 50,000+ km away.

    Polar orbiting satellites are nice because A) they maintain a pretty much constant height/velocity above the earth, and B) they can be recieved with handheld transcievers. Also its easier to predict passes. Disadvantage being that if you want 24-7 coverage you have to have a lot of them floating around (which is what iridium does, as well as a few other services)

    BTW - just for your info phase 4 sattelites (geo stationary) suffer the same problem as Phase 3 sattelites - most of the time they can only be recieved with a fixed station using high gain antennas.

  5. Re:Iridium Costs by ActiveSX · · Score: 2, Informative

    The service compresses the data to get this rate. The rate was the same if I zipped the file and then sent it.

    If you get the same rate sending compressed and uncompressed data, then the data isn't being compressed on the way there. If it was, then the uncompressed data would transfer at a higher rate.