I am not sure that LEO are a good answer.  Have you thought about how many
satellites you will need.  I would guess around  5 or 6 in the orbit trace.
The second problem will be the handover of the data between the satellites.
This means either cross links or a single hub that all satellites can see
and the routing is on the ground.   A third concern would be that
utilization.  Most of the time they would not be over Australia.
A better idea would be a set of towers along the route like 3rd generation
mobile system.  While the standards only give 2Mbps for fixed station unless
you are talking about a bullet train, I think they could be considered as
stationary.  It will take a little thought. 
Depending on the services offered, you might be able to use part of a GEO
transponder to feed the 3rd Gen Mobile from a single access point. 
Harry Smith 
Lockheed Martin Mission and Data Services
408 - 473 6491
> -----Original Message-----
> From:	[email protected] [SMTP:[email protected]]
> Sent:	Friday, September 29, 2000 10:51 PM
> To:	[email protected]
> Subject:	Moving Targets
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm doing a research project about providing Internet access to moving
> targets on the eastern seabord of Australia. In this case, the moving
> targets are trains.
> 
> We really need to provide around 1MB or so downstream, maybe 56k or so
> uplink. I've been doing a lot of searching but facts seem to be hard 
> to come by.
> 
> By my reckoning something like a link to an LEO constellation is 
> needed to make this work because:
>         - GEO satellites can't easily provide this type of bandwidth
>         - GEO satellites require reasonably large dishes and need to
> fairly precisely targetted at the sat
>         - Line of sight is needed for GEO links to work
> 
> Basically, I'm hoping that with LEO links a dish won't even be 
> required, some sort of antenna? Do any of the currently existing LEO 
> constellations provide this sort of service? Future ones?
> 
> Am I completely barking up the wrong tree here? Is there a better way 
> of providing reasonably high speed internet access to moving vehicles 
> without cabling etc.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Shaun
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 15:14:27 EDT