Multiple Low Earth Orbit satellite service will soon offer global internet access

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are cheaper to launch than geostationary satellites and, with modern manufacturing, can be cheap enough to make in the thousands.

There are several companies currently launching experimental satellites and it seems that there will soon be ways to get internet access either directly or via a small ground station that relays via local WiFi.

If the satellites are in very low earth orbit, some as low as 200km, the latency can be comparable to ground based internet services.

SpaceX

SpaceX was granted permission to launch 7,000 satellites for Starlink internet provision back in 2018. The full plan involves 30,000 satellites. The plan is offer internet to every part of the earth by having at least one satellite visible at any time. Initial service might start as early as 2020.

There's a rather out of date FAQ here on Reddit.

Amazon

Amazon's Project Kuiper involves 3,236 satellites at various low earth orbit heights. "784 satellites at 367 miles, 1,296 satellites at 379 miles, and 1,156 satellites at 391 miles". Rather than covering the entire globe, they're going for a band north and south of the equator that covers 95% of the population. 

OneWeb

OneWeb provides internet for business jets. Their system is made up of both a swarm of satellites and ground stations.

OneWeb recently completed tests from Seoul, South Korea using just six satellites and showed they could deliver "high-speed, low-latency services at speeds of more than 400 Mbps, enabling the fastest real-time video streaming in Full HD". Latency is reported to be 40 milliseconds but with an average of just 32ms.

Swarm Technologies

Swarm has been granted permission for a constellation of 150 LEO satellites for provision of non-voice Mobile-Satellite Services (MSS). While targeting IoT customers, which suggests low bandwidth. Reportedly 1kbps initially, rising to 2.7kbps. Not much good for internet but useful for tracking and messaging.

New internet competition?

The big question with all of these new options is the price. If players choose to go after the elite end of the market, such as business jets, then it won't affect many of us. If players, as Amazon is reported to be doing, target advanced markets like the US, then this could threaten terrestrial providers.

My hope is that we get services that target under served markets such as outback Australia and the Pacific Islands. Particularly in developing countries prices will need to be low to be affordable.

The equipment needed to talk to low earth orbit satellites must have rapidly steerable directional antennas but just as GPS receivers have become small and cheap, this will also become affordable at scale.

Can satellite internet be blocked?

Some countries filter the internet. Australia is on this list as a surveillance state. Unlike bans on receiving satellite TV (which used to require large dishes that could be seen), it's going to be hard to detect users of satellite internet. Like jamming of GPS, presumably these satellites or the receivers could be overwhelmed by strong RF until they comply with local requirements.

Please let me know in the comments if there are other players I've missed.

Great documentary about "Stuxnet" - "Zero Days"

There's a great documentary made in 2016 called "Zero Days" that I watched on the recommendation of a daughter. It investigates the detection, effect and alleged origin of the internet work publicly called StuxNet but known to the authors as "Olympic Games".

StuxNet was modified to aggressively spread itself but was originally highly targeted at industrial controllers connected to computers running Windows. The specific controllers ran nuclear fuel refining centrifuges.

When activated, the malware would spin the centrifuges until they were physically damaged.

What's interesting about cyber warfare is that it is a new kind of weapon which does physical harm to an enemy without it being obvious what happened and who the attacker was. It's clear that developed countries, with highly connected industrial control grids are highly vulnerable to this new kind of attack.

If our power grid was disabled by an external attacker, (for example), would that prompt a "kinetic" response?

I rented the movie on iTunes and highly recommend it.

Weekend away in the van near Goulburn playing ham radio

Kevin, VK2KB, kindly invited me to stay on a friend's property near Goulburn, south of Sydney. On a hill near the homestead, Kevin had installed a wire dipole for 40m. We added an extra dipole (fan style) for 80m and later Kevin put up another dipole for 160m.

The site seems too close for communication on 40m but 80m and in the evening, 160m was excellent.

Having no mains power and distant neighbours promises low noise and it certainly is up on the hill but closer to the house we found that the power inverter for the home solar system created quite an RF racket.

We put up a 40m dipole closer to the house (and power) which we transmitted on WSPR using an Ultimate beacon 3 and were received widely.

On Sunday we listened to the ARNSW Sunday broadcast from Sydney. You can see some of the antenna work here.

On Sunday evening, reception on 160m was excellent as you can hear here:

Out here, the blocks seem to all be 100 acres and up. I slept comfortably in the van even though the overnight low was 3C.

It was wonderful to meet a few neighbours who have built wonderful houses tuned to their own comfort. Here's Nick's place.

Nick also has built a pizza over out of dirt from an ant mound.

Pretty much everything is re-cycled.

Another neighbour, Michael, (shown at the top right of this post), showed us very interesting VR180 and VR360 movies playing on a Samsung Gear VR.

Tiny KT0803K transmitter won't do ham bands

John, VK2ASU, tipped me off about these boards. It's a little FM broadcast transmitter that can be controlled via two wire interface from an Arduino (for example). The chip is a Monolithic, digital stereo FM Transmitter KT0803K.

I got mine for AU$4.87 via eBay.

Sample software to drive it comes from the manufacturer Elechouse, here.

The board will transmit from 58MHz to 134MHz. It seems to get a little unreliable at the edges, I guess a PLL isn't locking or something.

I had to slightly modify the library for it to compile on the latest Arduino IDE. It seems they'd defined some integer sizes that are already defined these days.

In the file FMTX.h, up the top add this line:

#define __TYPE_REDEFINE 1

This will stop the type defines from being processed. Here's my test code based on their example.

#include "FMTX.h"

float fm_freq = 134;  // Here set the frequency

void setup(void)

{

  fmtx_init(fm_freq, AUSTRALIA); 

}

Anyway, a bit of fun for $5 and it certainly puts out a decent signal on the FM broadcast band. Disappointed I couldn't have a QSO on a ham band with it.

Amateur radio NSW meeting at Dural

A lovely day for a ham radio meetup. Great to see everyone and Dural is looking great with the amazing new antenna tower now in use.

Today was a trash and treasure and home brew group meeting.

The feature presentation from Gary was about microwave operation but we also had Bob showing an amazing ATTiny85 board, John on LoRa, Graham on a bus extender he made and then found on eBay (still great he made his own), and Colin showed his Clansman PRC320.

A NanoVNA was passed around and seems amazing for the money (as so many things do these days). I've ordered one for AU$60.

Here's a few pictures from the day.

Colin with a 10Kg radio:

Bob with a 10g computer

Graham with his extender cable:

Gary microwaving the audience.

John examines a microwave transverter from the Ukraine.

Antuino - first look at a "compact radio lab"

Ashhar Farhan, VU2ESE, creator of the low cost, excellent performance for the money uBitx and Bitx40, has a new gadget. A flexible test instrument in a single box called the Antuino. For US$99 plus optional US$10 courier shipping it turned up here in Sydney just five days after ordering.

It arrived well packed. A solid metal case, fully constructed (for some reason I thought there might be some work to do by me but that was just installing the big knob).

It can be powered either via a DC jack or it has long life running on 6 AA cells. I found that the cells were rather tight and power didn't come on due to some of the cells not being pushed by the springs to the positive contact.

The display is large and clear. One moves around the on-screen items by turning and pushing the knob.

Here's a plot of my 40m dipole. I found the low SWR being at the top a little unfamiliar but it makes sense.

Here's Stephen, VK2BLQ's excellent 40m loop plotted:

Rather than duplicate the creator's feature rundown, I'll just summarise here and say it's:

• Frequency signal source from 10Khz to 150MHz (and harmonics can be used beyond that).
• SWR meter with plot
• Field strength meter with logarithmic response
• Cable loss measurement
• RF Cable velocity factor
• Modulation meter
• Frequency response - able to plot filters

Best of all the software is open source and, as you can see in the photo above, it's powered by a standard Arduino Nano board. The schematic here. The circuit has:

• Arduino Nano as the brains
• JHD128x64 LCD 128x64 display
• Si5351A clock generator
• ADE-1 mixer
• AD8307 logarithmic amplifier
• 6 crystal 25Mhz IF filters
• 3 x 2N3904 gain stages in the IF

The main modes are:

• SWR - antenna analyser (use the RF In port)
• PWR - power measurement (Use the RF in port)
• SNA - network analyser (device between RF out and RF in ports)

The RF out is straight from an Si5351 clock generator and looks like this:

Playing around with the user interface, I find it takes more turns that I'd like to move between menu options. There are already a few forks of the software and, like the uBitX, I'm sure we'll see some great improvements built on top of the open software.

This is a great piece of test equipment for a home brewing radio enthusiast.

My next iPhone is an older iPhone SE, but I'm happy

Last time I upgraded iPhones I decided to lease the iPhone X rather than buying outright. This spreads the expense out over two years. After watching the latest iPhone launch, none of the new models attracted me and I already find the X too big in my pocket.

Looking around eBay I saw some second hand iPhone SEs at decent prices and I was lucky enough to get a 64GB model for AU$180. The colour is ugly (to me) rose gold but it was in excellent condition and the battery health is 99%. I was lucky, but even at $250, these are a good buy.

The iPhone SE is compact in the hand and pocket. The A9 processor is decent and it seems quite snappy running iOS 13 GM. (I'm in the developer program so have early access).

Although I'll miss the extra screen realestate of the iPhone X, I don't miss the size of the body and I prefer TouchID to FaceID. I love that I can wake the device with my finger when it's lying flat on a table.

Battery life isn't as good as the X although it's a fresh install and the Photos app is hammering the CPU doing all sorts of analysis so I expect this to continue for a day or two. Interestingly, Siri is using 20% of battery so far, so I've turned that off for now.

I returned the iPhone X to Telstra today. My goodness that SEBEL system is a dog! Poor Telstra shop staff. I'm saving $30 a month on a "bring your own device" plan but I know I can do better, perhaps on Aldi Mobile but I'll leave it a month or two before making more changes.

The sales woman was puzzled that I thought that $50 for 15GB was too much and explained that I was getting "unlimited" data. Oh, I said, 10 Terabytes? She had to explain that mobile phone operators mean something different by the word "unlimited".

I'm not alone in my enthusiasm for the iPhone SE, check out BuzzFeed's "Tim Cook Will Have To Pry My iPhone SE From My Cold, Tiny Hands".

There are a few apps, including ones from Apple, that don't handle the small screen too well. Happily, my WSPR Watch app has always been tested on the iPhone SE size screen so I'm not embarrassed there.

iOS 13 seems solid despite a rocky beta period. I think they've wisely taken out the things that were causing trouble and deferred them to 13.1.

Apple should make a phone the physical size of the SE, but with the edge to edge screen. I'm waiting for in-screen TouchID to appear, or perhaps FaceID could be made to work at very high angles?

The rise of shortwave broadcasting from China

On recent drive across Australia I was struck by the amount of shortwave broadcasting from China that could be heard.

There is some data available from the HFCC - International Broadcasting Delivery.

The files are fixed width fields which list broadcasts by frequency along with start time, end time, which days of the week, the country, the broadcaster and more.

Countries may have multiple broadcasts on different frequencies at the same time.

To measure output, I calculated the minutes on air of each listed broadcast and multiplied it by the number of days in each week that it's on and aggregated them by country.

Here are the top broadcasters as at August 2019. (Click for larger view).

Here's 2010. It's China, USA, Russia...

Here's 2000. Russia, USA, China. How times have changed.

Here's the changes amongst the top broadcasters now over this period. China is clearly on the rise.

There are many flaws in my simple analysis:

• Shortwave is used within large countries such as India and China for internal consumption.
• Different power levels and transmitter site and antenna direction should be taken in to account.
• The data may not cover all broadcasts "At present about 85 percent of the overall amount of global shortwave frequency requirements used for broadcasting is kept in this database. The missing 15 percent comprises some smaller stations in Africa and Latin America, as well as stations in the so called tropical broadcasting zone that employ shortwave transmissions for local listeners and are not interested in international co-ordination."
• Some transmitters use more than one antenna system at a time (beaming in different directions), currently I count those as two broadcasts.
• Radio New Zealand International provides programs which are broadcast in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu but I'm counting those as broadcasts from the administration countries rather than NZ.
• Several people have commented that the UK seems under represented in this data.
• There are, of course, other options including satellite, FM relay, and internet streaming but this post isn't about those.

I note with sadness that in 2010, Australia was placed 12th, in 2019 we are 57th.

Please let me know if someone else has done any analysis in this area. My thanks to HFCC - International Broadcasting Delivery for making this valuable data freely available.