Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!ll-xn!husc6!rice!titan!phil
From: phil@titan.rice.edu (William LeFebvre)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: TDRS-C means never having to say LOS?
Message-ID: <1945@kalliope.rice.edu>
Date: 2 Oct 88 14:39:09 GMT
References: <6732@dasys1.UUCP> <1934@kalliope.rice.edu> <6761@dasys1.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@rice.edu
Reply-To: phil@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre)
Organization: Rice University, Houston
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In article <6761@dasys1.UUCP> tneff@dasys1.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
>My thanks to William LeFebvre for those answers on the 2-TDRS network.

You're welcome.

>The other remaining interesting question is: will TDRS-C and -D be able
>to see each other as well as the ground?  If so, would that be useful?

If I understand things correctly, the answer is "no".  They will be in
opposing orbits.  They will both, however, be able to see TDRS-A.  I can't
really see much use for it anyway.  In just about any orbit imaginable,
you can point your antenna at one of the two and that is sufficient.  An
interesting question (and one that I just now thought about):  what do you
do when you are switching over from one TDRS to the other?  You typically
only have one antenna per band, so I guess there would be a small period
of LOS (loss of signal) while the antenna gets realigned.

			William LeFebvre
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University
			<phil@Rice.edu>