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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."

1 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. 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.