Virtual Satellite Celebrates Victory
by November 12, 2001 12:00 am 79 views
Remember Virtual Satellite Corp., the budding satellite signal innovator we first told you about in September 2000? The Fayetteville company has successfully tested its product thanks to a little help from Space Systems Loral and a couple of Tel-Star satellites that are 23,000 miles above the earth.
The virtual satellite uplink equipment was recently sent out to the San Francisco Bay area, and a team of electrical engineers and professors led by John Thacker has been supervising the testing. John Bush, former chief engineer of Telecomm General Corp., and Fayetteville engineer Greg Garner are also in on the project.
Bob Friedman, chairman and CEO of VSC, said the crew had recently transmitted signals to, and received broadband signals back from, two separate transponders on the Tel-Star “birds” for 14 straight days. These particular satellites are 17 degrees apart in space. But one Virtual Satellite System will have the capacity to simultaneous uplink and downlink with up to six satellites over a 30-degree arc.
The breakthrough is significant for the satellite industry because it’s the first method and apparatus for combining bits of unused capacity on the 4,103 transponders that are in operation today. Instead of spending more than $300 million to put another satellite into space, this technology enables firms to create a broadband signal by mingling transmissions to and from many transponders at once.
The trick is not just breaking the signal into parts and sending them to separate satellites, but getting them spliced back together so that the transmission is coherent. The distance of geosynchronous satellites from the earth changes gradually, and adjustments down to the millisecond must be made when combining multiple signals. The recent success was a major step in the firm’s development.
A number of notable electrical engineers and satellite experts have called VSC’s concept a “slam dunk.” Appropriately, the first video that was transmitted via the Virtual Satellite System was of a basketball game.