Congratulations on the excellent "Fiber in the Sky." The broadband satellites offer a lot of promise. Note, however, that Ka-band concepts were conceived and executed well before NASA's interest in Ka-band. A thorough presentation on a conceptual 30/20-GHz system appeared in 1969 in
Bell System Technical Journal
. I presented a paper at the June 1977 Radio Science Meeting at Stanford showing the advantages of 40- and 90-GHz satellite links. From a working system viewpoint, the Japanese have been commercial at Ka-band for a decade. They are presently launching a 44-GHz spot beam for Tokyo, for which there is no corresponding NASA program.
The 1997 International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) Voice,
Video, and Data conference includes a millimeter-wave session. The relative advantages and nuances of 40- and 90-GHz links will be discussed. Papers will appear in
Proceedings of SPIE
, vol. 3232. (See
http://www.spie.org
for details.)
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