 stations, 10 FEC, forward error correction. (See Reference 3, Chapter 4.) For voice communications, connectivity is limited to only one GEO satellite link because of the delay involved. CONCEPTS IN TRANSMISSION TRANSPORT Ampl. Mixer Ampl. From antenna To antenna Local oscillator Figure 9.17 Simplified functional block diagram of one transponder of a typical communication satellite. 22,300 mi Figure 9.18 Distances involved in satellite communications. One is looking down at or up at the equator (i.e., the circle). as illustrated in Figure 9.18. Because of the distance involved, consider the slant range from the earth station to the satellite to be the same as the satellite altitude above the equator. This would be true if the antenna were pointing at zenith (0-degree elevation angle) to the satellite. Distance increases as the pointing angle to the satellite decreases (elevation angle). We thus are dealing with very long distances. The time required to traverse these distances-namely, earth station to satellite to another earth station-is on the order of 250 ms. Round-trip delay will be 2 X 250 or 500 msec. These propagation times are much greater than those encountered on conventional terrestrial systems. So one major problem is propagation time and resulting echo on telephone circuits. It influences certain data circuits in delay to reply for block or packet transmission systems and requires careful selection of telephone signaling systems, or call-setup time may become excessive. Naturally, there are far greater losses. For LOS microwave we encounter free-space losses possibly as high as 145 dB. In the case of a satellite with a range of 22,300 mi oper- ating on 4.2 GHz, the free-space loss is 196 dB and at 6 GHz, 199 dB. At 14 GHz the loss is about 207 dB. This presents no insurmountable problem from earth to satellite, where 9.3 SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS comparatively high-power transmitters and very-high-gain antennas may be used. On the contrary, from satellite to earth the link is power-limited for two rea