Yaliny satellite telephone constellation

[Asteroza]

I have nothing to do with these guys, just thought it might be mildly interesting.

So a russian group called Yaliny is crowdfunding their startup, gunning as a slightly lower latency alternative to Iridium. Basically the same as Iridium, but what appears to be a data only (with VoIP layered on top for telephony) with 135 LEO sats and laser orbital crosslinks (Iridum considered using lasers in the past for their orbital switchboard crosslink system, but ultimately chose RF for both the first generation Iridium sats and the upcoming Iridium Next sats).

They are smart to do the all digital system with VoIP services, and they use something akin to a mobile wifi router brick as their customer terrestrial access terminal devices, linking to phones via wifi/bluetooth (so no phone hardware lock-in per se). While I don't give them very high chances of succeeding as a business, it's interesting that they are taking a different branch in the satphone constellation development tree. Though they appear to use RF for the teleport comm link rather than laser, so they aren't pushing that technology boundary.

http://yaliny.com

and their $1 million goal IndieGoGo campaign (note this is a flex campaign, so they walk away with any money raised)

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/yaliny-mobile-experience-you-ve-never-had/x/1736037#home



The satellite bus design is kinda odd though. Can anyone comment on the packaging tricks necessary for that big phased array antenna, for example?

[cuddihy]

It looks to me like they're repeating the error of Iridium, innovative in-space concept without a solid diverse terminal plan for the ground... I think Iridium is finally past that now. Hopefully if Yaliny launch this Russia will be in a position to bail them out when they fail the marketing piece, so 15 years from now Yaliny 2 can be a commercial success...

[Nilof]

They're stating that they want to launch the entire LEO infrastructure in one launch? How does that work with plane changes? Are they planning to boost them to different altitudes and use nodal precession?