Illustrative 600 km sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), not measured service performance. Model assumptions.
- 01
You have a satellite
It circles the planet every 90 minutes. Everything it collects has to come down, every command has to go up. The question is how.
- 02
You build a ground station
A dish only sees the satellite while it passes overhead: seven minutes, five times a day. Physics sets that limit, not the dish. The other ~98% of the day, data waits.
- 03
You rent more dishes
Antennas on every continent mean more passes, but a pass is still a pass: a booked eight-minute slot, then nothing. More dishes shorten the gaps. They cannot close them.
- 04
You try a GEO relay
A relay 36,000 km out sees nearly all of your orbit. The distance is also the catch: the signal fades with distance squared, so you get kilobits, and need a bigger antenna and more power to get even that.
- 05
We are building PermaSat
We are developing a 5G modem for your satellite, designed to connect through commercial constellations the way a phone connects to a cell tower. Our goal is to keep your satellite online without a ground station of your own. The scenario shown here models a future constellation, not an operational PermaSat service.
What the estimates mean
All figures are rounded model estimates for a satellite in a 600 km sun-synchronous orbit, simulated over seven days. The drawing is schematic, not a coverage map.
The PermaSat scenario estimates ~97% link availability and ~120 GB/day using synthetic IRIS² shells: 330 LEO satellites at 1,200 km and 18 MEO satellites at 8,000 km. It assumes a 20 cm Ku/Ka terminal, full return-channel allocation to one user satellite, 60% antenna efficiency and a 3 dB link margin. Assumed receive G/T is −1 dB/K in LEO (based on OneWeb) and an estimated +10 dB/K in MEO (informed by O3b), not verified IRIS² payload specifications.
The comparison uses a 3.7 m X-band ground station, a nine-site ground-station network and a 200 kbit/s GEO relay at full duty. Rates are estimated from geometry, slant range and DVB-S2 adaptive coding and modulation; they are not demonstrated 5G throughput. Actual capacity depends on spectrum, network access, scheduling, terminal design and operating conditions. These estimates are not an operational guarantee or a claim that PermaSat or this IRIS² scenario is deployed.
