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Samsung Puts Satellite TV in Cell Phones
prostoalex writes "Japanese subscribers will be able to get 70 television channels with a new cell phone, currently developed and tested by Samsung. Using an ARM microprocessor, Samsung makes it possible to receive satellite TV transmissions in 2.6 GHz range. No dish is required, however, for clarity of the signal the company is currently installing a network of repeaters. This could substantially increase the number of satellite TV subscribers, which in the United States is still a distant second to cable television."
depends....
My local cable tv advertises over 200 channels... only 20-30 are of any use... {with about 20-30 remaining being "Local Access" )
~GoAT~
If this ever makes it to the UK, due to the TV Licensing Nazis - if, say, every member of a household had one of these phones and used them while out of the house, a seperate TV license costing around $160 a year would be needed for each phone.
** A TV set powered by its own internal batteries - a pocket sized TV for example - may be covered by a licence at your home address.
aken straight from TV licensing web site:
** A TV set powered by its own internal batteries - a pocket sized TV for example - may be covered by a licence at your home address.
That is correct. Notice the use of the word "may". The "may" would apply IF no other TV was being used in your house while you were using the portable. This is why it is ok to have a (perhaps battery operated) TV in a holiday caravan, so long as your TV back home is not being used. It's like seat licensing for software.
If a TV receiving phone were used out of the house while the home TV were in use, you could be fined. (Catching you is another matter entirely however).
NEC's model can receive terrestrial VHF TV transmisions.
Samsung's model can receive satellite television.
There is an enormous difference.
A vital step towards realizing the service -- the successful launch of the satellite that will carry the programming -- has yet to be made.
Looks like we won't be seeing this for a few years, at least.
The handset design is one thing, but I'd really like to see the design of the satellite.
Since the article discusses the use of a single satellite, for use by Korea and Japan only, one concludes that the satellite must be in geosynchronous orbit (otherwise there would be service outages as it passed behind the earth). That puts it 22,300 miles up (in the Clarke Belt).
Since the Clarke Belt is so far away, a combination of
high transmitter power in the satellite,
good sensitivity (low noise figure) in the receiver back on Earth, and
high antenna gain at both transmitter and receiver
are typically used to make the link work. Modern satellite television (e.g., DirecTV) uses a relatively high frequency of operation (12 GHz) so that high antenna gain can be achieved in a physically small (i.e., less than two foot diameter) package. However, the article says that the proposed system operates at 2.6 GHz. This would seriously kill any hope of significant antenna gain at the receiver, even if one could design a gain antenna that could track a satellite in a mobile, handheld system.
Said another way, in the DirecTV system, the typical Earthside antenna has a gain of about 33.5 dBi. The handheld antenna gain will be doing well to reach 0 dBi. Since the DirecTV receiver has a noise figure of only 1 dB, no receiver sensitivity improvement is possible there. The only way to get back the 33.5 dB of link margin is to either increase the satellite's antenna gain by an additional 33.5 dB (which would make it impractically large, especially given the low frequency of operation, and give it a very small footprint on the Earth's surface) or increase the transmitter power by 33.5 dB (or 2239x).
How is the system to work?? Does anyone have a link margin calculation for this system?
No, you can do that already with the NEC V601N. The difference is, the V601N just picks up normal VHF / UHF stations, not satellite.
Already available in Europe. I don't know what chipsets the current phones are using but I have a devkit on my desk for a vector chipset capable of 2000Mip at 50mW power consumption. It handles realtime bidirectional MPEG4 rather easily and will be showing up in phones soon.
:(
Too NDA'd to give more details
3G services offered by Hutchison in Europe, Australia and Hong Kong can offer 3G phone to/from NetMeeting. So there isn't exactly nobody to call :-)