AWS Ground Station
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com
- Is it an EC2 instance with an SDR attached? What’s the software setup? Is it compatible with GNUradio?
- What are the the antenna RX gain(s)?
- What TX power can be used?
Edit: I found this presentation [1] which has some additional details. It does seem to be SDR based but I can’t find public information about many of the parts/interfaces in the architecture diagrams.
Edit 2: There are a few more breadcrumbs of information on the AWS documentation site [2]. It sounds like the EC2 instance receives VITA-49 (?) packets from the RF front end and you need special software to process them.
[1] https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2019/REPEAT_1_Enabl...
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ground-station/latest/ug/install...
All other solutions for streaming the data seem vendor specific to their hardware and software.
When AWS Ground Station launched I looked into their terms of service, hoping to be able to rent some time on their big dish to receive images from weather satellites. But no, you needed to own the satellite in question, not just have the keplerian elements for pointing at it and then demodulating the unencrypted, freely broadcast images from it. But no. Gota own the sat.
I wonder if that has changed.
But I can understand why. It's not like you want to run a SIGINT-As-A-Service platform that everybody with a credit card and maybe a Delaware corparation can use.
Not illegal or nefarious things either, but could I do something like listen in on data being transmitted down by an existing satellite (say something like Hubble or Landsat that will eventually result in public data anyway)?
Well, now I’d love to know about exciting illegal things one could theoretically do with this.
Maybe pop a root shell on a satellite and have the coolest bouncer on efnet?
Maybe you could spy on satphones? But I guess AWS would be prohibitively expensive for that.
disclaimer: I'm involved in SatNOGS and Libre Space Foundation since the very beginning
How does it compare to the closed-source/proprietary alternatives?
Ground-stations are operated by individuals organizations, or corporations using existing antenna systems (from simple static quadrafilar antennas to large radiotelescopes) and SDRs.
All data are publicly available for all. That can be very useful for example for experimental university cubesats teams that have a hard time receiving their own satellites.
Proprietary solutions focus usually on building their own hardware infrastructure instead of crowdfunding it. The data are by default available only to the operators of the satellites, they incorporate several pricing schemes.
Needless to say that SatNOGS caters very different needs than such proprietary networks.
On the space portion, companies often rent a partial payload on other satellites with a timeshare agreement for booting up their bits and using the antennas to beam things down/up.
Thanks for details. What do you mean, would you elaborate please?
It’s definitely resolvable but it’s non-trivial and requires dealing with people who are familiar with the intricacies of a specific government bureaucracy. There’s no equivalent of “a Wi-Fi module” for space and despite the massive improvement in electronic systems that can survive in space for a while, you’re going to run into a brick wall of red tape the moment you want to communicate with your space craft due to how complicated the regulatory environment is in space for small operators. A great example is the fees involved, for a first time applicant it’s AU$135,000 to file the paperwork (plus extra if it’s not perfect and they have to work with you to actually get it accepted) to use a radio in space, that’s $135000 to say “I’m going to use standard s band communications at x number of watts power using a global commercial provider like Amazon and have nothing custom at all” and it’s sufficiently uncommon that there’s not even a form to fill in so you end up having to talk to people they recommend as consultants just to find out how to format the documents you’re sending them.
All of this is complicated gone for laser communication systems. If you have a ground station with appropriate airspace clearance (cause firing lasers into airplane cockpits is bad) which is actually pretty easy to coordinate as the air traffic regulations are used to putting in place all sort of “don’t go here during x/y hours” type notices and it’s not a big deal to them why… all the paperwork is done at that point other than your launch permits. No radio regulation, no ACMA rip off fees, no hassle at all. It’s just very difficult to get laser communication equipment at the moment as it’s still the bleeding edge. It’s rapidly growing as commercial providers bring things to market but it’s still getting through the chicken-or-egg phase of you don’t have demand for ground stations without satellites and satellites can’t use them without ground stations. But it’s slowly improving.
However for a long time cost will be prohibitive for laser comma. Despite the elimination of all the fees and bureaucracy it’s still much cheaper to develop your small satellite with off the shelf Software defined radio hardware which can cost significantly less money during development and prototyping phases because the cost of commercial “off the shelf” parts for space hardware is insane.
I’m looking forward to SpaceX getting starship flying because it’s going to utterly destroy this state of affairs by sheer market forces. The first year of starship flying commercial payloads once a week, will be able to put more hardware into orbit than we have in the entire history up to this point, including falcon 9 and the copious launches of Starlink satellites. When it costs more to file the paperwork than it does to build and launch your entire cubesat, ($100000 is very generous budget for a 3-6 month cubesat if SpaceX live up to their projected costs per kilogram to orbit… minus regulation costs) your going to see people push for the necessary regulatory changes to get us an equivalent to “Wi-Fi” but in space, an anyone can use this under x watts frequency allocation that will just open the floodgates to innovative small satellite designs and projects.
?
Like I said, there’s really only two scenarios to change this. One is that we get regulatory change, which the ITU (the people globally in charge of radio regulation between countries, the FCC and ACMA coordinates their respective countries compliance with ITU regulations in order to meet extremely well established treaty obligations, the ITU is over a hundred years old) rejected the need for in their last meeting, based on evidence gathered in the years before that, essentially this entire scenario will break down when Starship slashes launch costs and they will either rule with an iron fist or bend to allow ISM band style approaches in space. The other is if laser communication systems come down significantly in price, the current cheapest I’ve seen is a one way (space to ground) link for “$10000 USD” list price and that wasn’t available ready to order and had no flight heritage so I’d be unsurprised if the price became $25k USD when it finally had some flight heritage. (One of the nasty secrets of aerospace engineering is how much Commercial “Off The Shelf” hardware is actually just built to order based on an approved design) and you need two way units to actually become cheap enough they aren’t more expensive than a radio permit is, which they aren’t at the moment since most people would have to both get the satellite hardware in the order of a hundred thousand or more, and also build a dedicated observatory with a sufficiently good telescope and powerful enough laser as their ground station which will probably set you back at least $50k unless you score as bargain or strike a deal with someone operating an experimental one.
Yea, that was basically the idea I was asking about, but like you explained, it seems laser links are expensive and rare still, so I guess that isn't an answer for at least a while yet.
Thanks for the great answer!
AWS does eliminate the capex of setting up your own antennas all over the world. If you just want to downlink from your satellite, radiating into another country's borders is possible as long as that country did not object/request coordination with the satellite/ITU filing.
Some countries require receive-only earth stations (which is any antenna/terminal that receives a signal from a satellite) to be licensed, but many do not. AWS would eliminate that particular set of paperwork, but that's really not that much paperwork compared to ITU regulations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546272
In contrast, Azure's orbital data is in "preview" in 2021 with little discussion:
it is fashionable to dislike Microsoft and has been for most of Microsoft's life.
I don't see a lot of "fans" of specific cloud services. They are each flawed in different ways.
Microsoft gets bashed in the context of open source. In the context of running a cloud, I've only ever seen them praised for actually hiring customer support staff.
did I say something inflammatory? AWS gets a lot of attention on this site, and Azure doesn't.
I mean I haven't measured it, but it isn't a leap at all to have this position.
I mean, sure, there's a bunch of inveterate microsoft haters on here (with varying levels of quality of reasoning for their hate), but I don't think their existence is the main driver of the lack of commenters using Azure.
1. Kuiper uses a different RF band (Ka vs X or S), needs an order of magnitude more ground stations, doesn’t need all the *aaS infrastructure bits)
0: https://blog.maxar.com/earth-intelligence/2018/sending-data-... (posted the same day Ground Station was launched in 2018)