Quarterly report thread. $ASTS

Excellent initial impression.

August delivery of FM1 !

5 launches before Q1 -26

1.5Bn+ at hand

🧶🐈‍⬛

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stocktitan.net/news/ASTS/ast-… Signed two additional early-stage contracts for the U.S. Government end customer, bringing the total to eight contracts to date with the U.S. Government as an end customer.

This is huge.

The rate at which company adds DoD contracts is staggering. It’s not in analyst models.

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Old and new FM1 Mission overview.

Gone is ”technology pathfinder”

And gone os that it is enhanced ..”to support the higher throughput”.

It’s simply ”.. an enhanced satellite bus (controlsat)”

Now how to do that?

🧶🐈‍⬛
Meet Aces 1 - 4 a technology pathfinder mission for DARPA Blackjack.

Notice modular design.

Piggy back payload.

Build your own satellite by adding modules.

This was the early vision on how to do golden dome / PWSA type satellites.

🚨STARLINK DRAINS BATTERY 🚨

Why the Starlink 🪫 d2c earth moving cells are a really bad design choice can fill a book.

Carrying around an app that rapidly drains your battery in a disaster scenario isn’t optimal.

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https://x.com/catse___apex___/status/1887606423212949820?s=46&t=IAdas7XGtpsHUboQt8WQJA

I’d like to focus not on how these rapid-fire beam to beam handovers causes dropped texts. Not on how that type of beams cause more border interference. Etc.

But on battery.

Starlink 🪫 d2c does not like
AST 🔋SpaceMobile fix the beam onto you with adaptive beamforming.

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🚨 $ASTS TO LAUNCH SATELLITE 🚨

🐈‍⬛ BREAKING NEWS AFTER CLOSE 🐈‍⬛

AST SPACEMOBILE TRADING ON NASDAQ AS $ASTS FILES NEW STA FILING WITH THE @FCC. ASKS TO LAUNCH HUGE SATELLITE.

ASKS OK BEFORE APRIL 21.

SATELLITE SLATED FOR LAUNCH IN Q2 THIS YEAR. TENTATIVE MAY LAUNCH.

🧶🐈‍⬛

/1

As we assumed AST uses STA instrument for the first Block 2 satellite.

Which is to be launched by ISRO

The narrative. Link:

.

And snapshots.

2/n apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm…

🚨FCC WAIVER IMPLICATIONS🚨

📓DEEPDIVE DD EXPLAINED 👨🏼‍💻

Let’s start:

The way you can differentiate emmissions in space [where] and in time [when] and in strength [how much] you can also differentiate in the frequenzy domain [which channel].

That you transmit in.

🧶🐈‍⬛

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https://twitter.com/catse___apex___/status/1876311548102418600

The transmissions are ”good signals” if they’re [when], [where], [as strong] and [which channel] combo that is needed to do the transmission that is sought for.

Another combo is ”a waste”.

But some other combos also do harm.
”Bad signal”

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🚨SPACEMOBILE $ASTS FULL FCC GRANT FOR 🇺🇸 BLOCK 1 β-TESTS🚨

✅$ASTS REGULATORY READINESS NOW ON PAR WITH STARLINK D2C

✅$ASTS TECHNOLOGICAL READINEDS WAY BETTER,

⏳ WHICH IS ABOUT TO BE SHOWCASED 🎬🎥🍿

🧶🐈‍⬛

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As a ten tweet primer the competition in the form of Starlink regenerative architecture(green👇) is having severe problems with handovers.

As also can be seen AST is a different architecture altogether.

You’ll notice:

One single core.
gNBs (5G)

V/S

Two cores
eNB & gNB

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Welcome to todays episode of

MAKING MICRONS

Prsenting is me, CatSE, to walk you through the wonders of advanced phased arrays.

Todays subheading is

COMPARISON.

We’ll relate micron generations to eachother and to others arrays.

🧶🐈‍⬛

Let’s start!

1/n The Block1 micron is a panel about 30 millimeters thick and 644 x 1,288
millimeters wide.

On one side antennas and on the other solar panels.

The antennas have a spacing that corresponds to a certain spectrum band.

The larger the spacing the lower the frequenzy.

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Small update.

Starlink beam diameter of 50 km. (Blue)

Advertised AST midband beam diameter is 24 km for comparison.(Red)

What it means practically is that spectum deployed with Starlink d2c will be used by 3.3 x more users per MHz.

Cutting area SE to 1/3 by this metric alone.
-It’s called SpectRum with an R, cat.

-Right. My mistake. I like all sorts of Rum

🍹 🌈🛜 no offense intended.

-What is ”area spectral efficiency, cat?

-It is the key performance metric of an 3GPP NTN system.

-What is it made of and why is it important?

-I’m glad you asked

The case for Low Earth orbit radar.

And sharing spectrum between DoD and Telecom.

This image shows the Chinese bomber fleet range. Previous and that of H-20 bomber project a bomber similar to the US flying wing stealth bombers.

As can be seen Hawaii is now within range.

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A bit smaller regional nuclear capable strike aircraft like this one shown yesterday (JH-XX ?) are likely capable of reaching places like Guam and Japan.

The two types of aircraft are built for stealth, low observability. And likely capable of electronic warfare.

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Let us look at the SDA opportunity.

What does $ASTS have that SDA might seek?

How does that fit with PWSA architecture and timelines.

Any hints there is a fit or work in progress between the two space architectures?

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AST was selected to be part of HALO pool. From this pool they can be awarded contract for 2 space vehicles.

This is when AST themselves became a prime DoD partner.

In parallell we know that another AST partner which also has a prime contract staus with the DoD are testing OISL

There are many people speculating in revenue from AST satellites.

A year ago @thekookreport and I did some math.

It’s in his report.

1/n One simple key to understanding data transmission capacity in networks is the difference between bits and bytes.

A byte contains 8 bits.

2/n

Starlink withdraws a letter and gets an commercial license for direct to cell 4G text messaging.

A thread. 🧶🐈‍⬛

1/n Here is the filing Space-X withdrew.

Space-X no longer procent objects to FCC measures protecting NASA S-band installations from Starlink emissions abroad.

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$ASTS Requests Testing Authority with Vodafone Spectrum.

Asks to start tests on december 10th 2024 using the five Block 1 BlueBirds.

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Filed yesterday this requests testing in a band operated by Vodafone Turkey.

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A guy in Switzerland listening in on S-band is picking up Bluebirds.

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I belive that 400 MHz TT&C channel is registered much more frequently is due to more radio astronomers listening in that band which also is hobby radio astronomy babd. Not that the S-band isn’t as active. Just fewer listening in.

Still good to see activity.

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And now for the cats take on how a Trump win affects $ASTS.

We will talk about geopolitics, satcom architecture choices and natural selection.

1/n Let me start by saying that I am a rural conservative politician with guns and military grade sensors as my hobbies.

I have no doubt I’d vote republican in a US context. And what I am about to say on Trump winning is not an endorsment of Harris.

I am not part of that division.

MNOs worldwide thinking about what flavor of direct to cell to serve their customers will need to select between a few different design choices.

I list some here. 🧶🐈‍⬛

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AST SpaceMobile is transparent.

It is using a terrestrial Nokia AirScale single-RAN gNodeB.

It is G-agnostic and a 5G tested and capable system.

The terrestrial basestation makes it MIMO capable.

This allows lawful intercept by nation states Police.

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Starlink d2c is ising earth moving cells.

Scott (see attached tweet) noticed how this affects network IDs.
Let’s ask ChatGPT if this feature helps Starlink?

🧶🐈‍⬛

Note: AST has purpose built their technology to replicate terrestrial cell sites and AST is using earth fixed cells

https://twitter.com/scott23192/status/1839503316222353633

Oh no, not good.

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Let’s talk about 600 MHz.

That FCC authorized for SCS use.

- who owns it?
- who can provide SCS from it?

1/n T-Mobile owns it.

And a few local/ minor other carriers.

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BlueBirds have all flipped to radar cross section large.

They also exhibit this type of increase
in drag.

I conclude that detumbling was succesful and that the payload now consistently displays a large radar reflecting cross section towards earth.

Likely still inside the LVAs.

BlueWalker 3 exhibited the same signature change of increased drag coefficient and a RCS flip 2022-10-06

~ Launch + 26 days.

The 5 BB1s are all there Launch +10 days.

Practice makes perfect.

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Applications in all four phases.

Observe - sensor input
Orient - coms
Decide - more coms
Act - electronic warfare

Communications use cases but also non communications use cases.

The specs of a set of formation flying BB1 FPGAs makes them FF-SAR FoPen AKA FOLPEN capable.

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https://twitter.com/catse___apex___/status/1799490956737003584

Things has molecules in them. They react to electromahnetic fields differently.

And you can add resolution/ signature by formation flying, by dual polarization and by large bandwidth.

AST does all of that. ✅✅✅👀

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Constellation level aggregated out of band emmission interference is a showstopper for Starlink.

This is due to crazy big leakage in adjacent bands/channels.

So when constellation increase from 300 to 4500 (15x) they need to cut radiated power down to 15%
The system can’t scale There is a term for such a system:

Non-scalable architecture. In technical contexts, this is often referred to as negative scaling or diminishing returns.

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