- 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.
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.
0: https://blog.maxar.com/earth-intelligence/2018/sending-data-... (posted the same day Ground Station was launched in 2018)
