This
is the interior of the RF shack at the entrance.Inside the RF shack
This
is the interior of the RF shack at the entrance.
Eyvind
Flater is the man in charge here and is currently the only satellite tech on
station.
As
you can guess, there's lots of cool racks.
Here's
some satellite modems, switches, servers, and a scope for checking the satellite
signal.
Here at South Pole, we currently have access to three satellites: GOES, TDRS, and MARISAT. GOES (1978) is an old NOAA weather satellite, who's weather functions no longer operate so it's now a cut-rate communications satellite, TDRS (1978) is an old communications satellite, and MARISAT (1976) is another old communications satellite that's been given over to do work in the unusual orbit that it's in now. I've been told that GOES is so decrepit that we might lose it any day now because it's due to run out of fuel and they won't be able to control it for much longer. It's spun out of control at least one time that I know of and will probably do the same in the future- and we might not get it back then. So that leaves us with TDRS and MARISAT. As far as data transfer goes in terms of regular internet, I've seen around 35 Kbytes/sec for MARISAT, ~22 Kbytes/sec for TDRS, and ~6 Kbytes/sec for GOES during their respective passes. Taken together, we have about 14 hours of internet a day- not too shabby, and nothing really to complain about. But those transfers are just for ordinary surfing. As you can probably guess, the stream is divided up among the primary users, the science projects. The dark sector is the main user and they transmit dozens of gigs a day. Over here at ARO, we might only use 5 to 10 megs a day- our experiments just don't use that much bandwidth compared to the other groups (although we probably produce more yearly science cargo than them). The rest of the bandwidth goes to IP phones. At peak satellite times, that system can handle about 4 people at a time.