[Server-sky] Server Sky - ISDC, IEEE, Geodesic Arrays

[Michael Turner]

Happy to keep getting updates by email.
Regards,
Michael Turner

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On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> Server Sky News:
>
> I presented Server Sky at ISDC 2013 in San Diego two weeks ago;
> some new technical developments, and some applications.  I will
> present server sky at the IEEE Sustainable Technology conference
> August 1 to 2 in Portland.
>
> I stumbled across an interesting way to arrange Server Sky
> thinsats, as vertices of a distorted geodesic sphere.  Thinsats
> trace ellipses around the central orbit, changing between
> perturbations of radial distance and tangential distance.  Along
> with an oscillating NS distance change from the central orbit,
> the thinsat arrays appear to rotate and skew.
>
> Rather than put thinsats in some sort of grid, their orbits are
> now designed to follow the surface of an ellipsoid, with spacings
> mimicking those of an icosahedral geodesic sphere - distorted by
> the rotation and skew.  This increases the number of thinsats in
> at a higher radius from center, which helps with focus, and the
> triangular grid spacing washes out the unwanted grating lobes in
> the primary beam.  The sparse spacing of the thinsats still wastes
> most of the transmit power away from the small receiver antenna,
> but that waste power is uniformly spread over a hundred thousand
> square kilometers, far below the interference threshold of other
> receivers, and at levels a trillion times lower than the mW/m²
> levels that raise health concerns.
>
> See http://server-sky.com/IEEESustech2013
> for a draft of the IEEE paper, and for a flash animation of a
> small rotating array of 1002 thinsats formed into a 5kg, 4kW system.
> That is 30% of the power of the largest comsat, with 200 times the
> effective antenna aperture area, weighing less than a 2U cubesat.
> Typical arrays will be 7842 thinsats with a few hundred nearby spares.
>
> Keith
>
> P.S. This is a test of the server sky mailing list, which I haven't
> used for a while.  Are you folks interested in more mails like this,
> or should I put everything on http://server-sky.com instead?
>
> --
> Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
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