Comment by hobonation
4 hours ago
Iridium terminals can be very power-efficient. Consumer ones are the size of a deck of cards and can last for days.
4 hours ago
Iridium terminals can be very power-efficient. Consumer ones are the size of a deck of cards and can last for days.
I wonder how much of the power-efficiency is due to being much slower.
Don’t need to blast and beam-steer if you can deal with poor SNR by taking your time to differentiate the 0s and 1s?
Which is more power efficient per megabyte?
(But I get it: sometimes a few bits is all you need)
All of it. You can't really get around physics.
Iridium has historically targeted low-power, omnidirectional terminals (antennas can be larger at lower frequencies without requiring steering than at higher frequencies).
They recently had some forays into steered, high-bandwidth antennas with their Certus line and their second-generation satellites that now allow native packet switching (the first gen was circuit-switched at 2.4 kbps only), but that brings you into the bandwidth-limited regime, and is honestly just a waste of scarce L-band spectrum and much better served by all the Ku- and Ka-band LEO competitors.
It's going to be interesting to see if Rocketlab start also serving that market, like some of their main competitors already are.