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Satellite Earth stations come in a number of sizes. For example, an 18 meter satellite Earth station can follow/track orbiting satellites and has its own de-icer. Another example is a VSAT [Very Small Aperture Terminal], a fixed terminal that provides data transmission speeds from 128-512 KBPS [Kilo Bits Per Second] upload (transmission) and 256-2048 KBPS (2048 is E-1-European configuration of 32 channels of 64,000 BPS).

Some of the common satellite frequencies are: C-Band-3-6 GHz - X-Band-8-12 GHz - Ku-Band-12-18 GHz- Ka-Band-27-40 GHz-GigaHertz.

Now for satellite math. The speed of radio/light is 300,000,000 (or precisely 299,792,458) meters per second. If a geostationary satellite is 22,300 miles (not meters), how long does it take a signal to go up and then down to the destination? That’s two times 22,300 or 44,600 times 5,280 (feet in a mile) times 12 inches or 2,825,856,000 inches divided by 300,000,000 (39.37 inches) or 1,1811,000 inches. Doing the math and the conversion, the answer is ~239 milliseconds for each segment or ~478 or both or about a half-second delay.

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Tags: vsat, very small aperture terminal, satellite earth station, kbps, satellite frequencies