What might somebody (or some company) use this for?
192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?
192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?
Sensors along a pipeline etc to monitor remote infrastructure.
Texting in remote areas for logging, cattle, forestry services, etc.
Redundancy for boats, emergency services etc that may have primary and secondary communication channels, but still greatly benefit from the capacity for redundant txt messages.
2 way communications aren't much more demanding because most of what you need can be done with lookup tables, and there aren't that many different commands you would need to send to an asset tag for local scanning. If you want to do person-to-person, 2 bytes per word is sufficient for a fairly large vocabulary (especially a tightly specified one like military brevity codes) - not exactly chatty but sufficient for many operational/emergency purposes.
The $60/yr plan allows for 750 _messages_ per month. Up to 3000 messages per month if you stack 4 plans together.
So on the base plan, you're limited to ~1 message per hour if you spread it out across the month.
How so? 6 messages per day is one message per 4 hours.
Err, no - at 750 packets/month, you’d burn through your allocation in 12.5 hours at that rate.
I bet the military/intelligence community has all sorts of ideas!
eg https://marketplace.att.com/products/att-iot-dataplans-lte-n...
disclaimer: I work with In-Q-Tel investments almost daily, but am not affiliated.
Do you see any interesting trends? In terms of one layer deeper than the general trends such as AI, space, etc.
https://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-slaps-birach-broadcasti...
People in radio station studios generally don't listen to the over-the-air signal because there is a delay. A silence sense is a circuit that monitors the over-the-air signal and takes action when it's been too quiet for too long. This is usually an indication that something has failed, either at the transmitter, or in the studio-transmitter link. It is sometimes triggered by dramatic pauses in classical music and talk show content, but in those cases is ignored by the DJ/host/producer.
They've been around forever, and can be made from simple analog circuits. In the stations where I've worked, if the silence sense activated, a red light lit up in the DJ booth, and the engineering department. Some stations had a secondary silence sense that would wait a bit longer, and light up a light bulb at the receptionist's desk because she had the master list of phone numbers to call the right people in case of a transmission failure.
There are thousands of radio station transmitters that are far enough away from the originating studio that it's not possible for the studio to hear the over-the-air signal, so a silence sense on top of a mountain, next to the transmitter could send an alert packet via this satellite service back to the studio to let someone know something is wrong.
Their suggested architecture was basically to use this for notifications for very remote sensors: "battery below 20%. Come help" etc
The other way is for things like Garmin InReach: "Send message 1" (which is "I'm ok and don't need help") etc.
In the normal case, you send a heartbeat once per (interval calibrated to threat model). Should be plenty of packets left to encode "send lawyers, guns and money" when necessary.
Hopefully some resellers pop up that let you buy them onesie-twosie to tinker with.
I wonder how much total bandwidth each of these satellites can push per month. Anyone know the backend aggregate sustained data rate per sat?
They were anticipating some legislation that would require full auditability of supply chain.