Re: How many satellites are in geosynchronous orbit by now?

In article <Ao5lf.2072$Cl2.41877@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Soren Kuula <dongfang@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Yeah I guess there's about as much scrap of there as there are
>satellites ;) I wonder how they keep updates on which is which of the
>long dead ones..? And will they give a good enough reflection on a radar
>to see them?

Radar is not very useful up there -- the strength of a radar echo drops as
the distance to the fourth power, barring some special cases. Most
high-orbit objects are tracked optically. (An ordinary camera with modest
lens, on a tripod, with the shutter left open a while, will show you a
line of roughly-evenly-spaced dots across the night sky: GSO.)

>Another thing I was thinking about: Transponder piracy! Don't those
>communications sats simply receive some band of RF, shift it up or down
>some MHz og GHz, and retransmit wholesale?

Mostly, yes, although the more sophisticated ones do smarter things now.

>I wonder how much of a chance
>a pirate would have of stealing some relay capacity, by beaming his
>uplink in the same band as the owner's one ;) ? ?

It's happened. The owners notice such things really quickly.
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