Greater message capacity for satellites

The future requirements and means to achieve increased bandwidth utilization by communications satellites are examined. Noting that service and demand is doubling every four years for the Intelsat system, a reallocation of earth-based and satellite-based transmitters is mentioned as becoming necessary to avoid communications interference in selected bands and still allow dispersed reception for home microwave reception. The employment of polarized antennas is examined, along with antenna-beam shaping to achieve maximum use of available frequencies. Time division multiple accessing permits utilization of individual frequencies by several ground stations, and digital encoding of signal allows lower processing power while also requiring bandwidth compression. NASA is mentioned as preparing multimission satellites, ground-based links, and satellite-to-satellite links to relieve the congestion on presently used channels.