I wonder if there were an upconverter(to L-band) and final amplifier on the LoRa board(or an out-of-band hack on a 2.4ghz board) if that would be enough to hit the satellite, they have pretty sensitive receivers, I am having trouble finding documentation on the data encoding and exact channel plan for that service though.
I would like to see what Apple is doing hardware wise as it appears that they are using a simple FCC certified low speed data firmware hack(or rather just employing the modem's SDR tech with this added mode as it would a new terrestrial mode) on the Qualcomm X65 5G cellular modem and requiring aiming the phone at the receiving satellite to get good-enough propagation and polarity vs say a Spot palmtop messenger gadget which just needs to be out under open sky.
It is a bit unfortunate that we don't have an unlicensed low speed data satellite service to experiment with outside amateur radio, considering the ban on any kind of privacy or anonymity in that mode; though again I guess we all could have hacked this service onto a pinephone from day one with a pogo pin adapter ribbon and some serial pushes over the I2P to a Globalstar prototype module.
That this is likely just an extended firmware mode just exposes how little control we have over our devices, Apple asks and gets from Qualcom the firmware they want, but we will probably also see this become common built-in feature as time goes on. Though I wonder how many of these signals the globalstar L-band simplex system can handle.
So hoping for eventual built-into-cellular-modems user friendly and user's privacy friendly common options to access globalstar or similar low orbit data services for uplink and maybe a cool no-dish low speed data hack on maybe a downconverted Ku TV satellite transponder space bought by the FOSS-friendly community for data downlink similar to Othernet.
I would like to see what Apple is doing hardware wise as it appears that they are using a simple FCC certified low speed data firmware hack(or rather just employing the modem's SDR tech with this added mode as it would a new terrestrial mode) on the Qualcomm X65 5G cellular modem and requiring aiming the phone at the receiving satellite to get good-enough propagation and polarity vs say a Spot palmtop messenger gadget which just needs to be out under open sky.
It is a bit unfortunate that we don't have an unlicensed low speed data satellite service to experiment with outside amateur radio, considering the ban on any kind of privacy or anonymity in that mode; though again I guess we all could have hacked this service onto a pinephone from day one with a pogo pin adapter ribbon and some serial pushes over the I2P to a Globalstar prototype module.
That this is likely just an extended firmware mode just exposes how little control we have over our devices, Apple asks and gets from Qualcom the firmware they want, but we will probably also see this become common built-in feature as time goes on. Though I wonder how many of these signals the globalstar L-band simplex system can handle.
So hoping for eventual built-into-cellular-modems user friendly and user's privacy friendly common options to access globalstar or similar low orbit data services for uplink and maybe a cool no-dish low speed data hack on maybe a downconverted Ku TV satellite transponder space bought by the FOSS-friendly community for data downlink similar to Othernet.
