Multi mission low earth orbit equatorial satellite for Indonesian regions

Low earth orbit (LEO) equatorial satellite has become a favorable option for developing countries like Indonesia. Low propagation delay, low transmission power and also low cost in term of satellite development and launch are the main attraction of the LEO satellite system. In this paper, we propose multi mission satellite LEO equatorial satellite for telecommunication, surveillance and vessel monitoring based on AIS (Automatic Identification System). First iteration was the tradeoff between communication payload mission and other missions in defining the orbit constellation type and altitude. Simulation was done for orbit constellation, orbit environment, antenna pattern, and coverage analysis. The simulation result will become input for link budget calculation, ITU constraint (PFD and EPFD) and handover mechanism scheme selection. The result shows that single plane 1500 km LEO equatorial with 14 satellites was able to provide dual satellite diversity for all Indonesian region. It also shows that C-band and Ku-band Frequency will exceed the EPFD limit with 10 dbi antenna gain and 30 W transmit power. The optimum configuration of Ext C-band with hemispherical patch antenna shows that the minimum fading margin > 1 dB is required to implement the hard handover scheme.