Originally Posted by
BWV 988
Thanks for the thorough explanation US. Do you mean 24/7 sampling at 3+ GHz could be taking place in the sat? I understand the reasoning but doubt the practicalities.
I think he means on the ground-station. This would work if the satellite just very stupidly relays the signal in its raw form somehow and doesn't interpret/regenerate it before. I'm a bit hazy in this area, but I know its possible to do with wavelenghts in fibre so RF should be amenable to something similar. And yes, I would not be (very) surprised if the ground-station actually does some full sampling of the IF frequency, and maybe even saves it for later. Extremely valuable for finding faults etc.
If you didnt know there are SDR USB-dongles that can do ~3Mhz bandwidth full sampling costing ~10$. That a satellit ground-station is capable of something similar is not weird.