Satellite features
250-300 spot beams
Digital beam forming (which provides for dynamic area coverage and optimises over change in traffic demand)
Single hop link for mobile-to-mobile communications
High power capacity
Dynamic satellite power control providing 10dB link margins
The Thuraya system is comprised of three key elements - Space Segment, Ground Segment and User Segment.
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Frequencies:
Mobile Links
Earth-to-space 1626.5-1660.5 MHz
Space-to-Earth 1525.0-1559.0 MHz
Feeder Links
Earth-to-space 6425.0-6725.0 MHz
Space-to-Earth 3400.0-3625.0 MHz
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Payload Subsystem
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12.25 meter aperture deployable satellite antenna
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On-board digital signal processing (DSP) to facilitate interconnectivity between the common feeder link coverage and the spot beams to make effective use of the feeder link band and to facilitate mobile to mobile links between any spot beams
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Digital beam-forming capability which allows Thuraya to reconfigure beams in the coverage area, to enlarge beams and to activate new beams. It also allows the system to maximise coverage of "hot spots", or those areas where excess capacity is required.
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The flexibility to allocate 20% of the total power to any spot beam.
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The flexibility to reuse the spectrum up to 30 times and therefore use the spectrum efficiently.
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The signal characteristics of 8 time-multiplexed voice circuits:
Modulation pi/4 QPSK
FDMA carrier channel BW 27.7 kHz
Channel bit rate is 46.8kbps