The GOES-3 Satellite was one of the Geo-Synchronous weather satellites. It has been replaced by a newer satellite, and most of the imaging equipment on it, has failed. It however still has a working transponder.

Since they no longer station keep the satellite it does a small figure 8 on the equator. During the southern portion of that, it is visable to several locations in Antarctica. For Siple Dome we were getting about 7 and 1/2 hours of coverage a day, at 32 Kbps. (We had almost 8 at 9600 bps).

The dish is a simple home TVRO dish, that was modified to fit the feed point.

The terminal equipment is rather straight forward. It consists of a Cisco 2500 Router, which was connected to the network the SOAR project had set up for their mapping.

The router (bottom most equipment in rack) connects to a satellite modem (gray above the router), which outputs the the data at a 70 Mhz IF, between a -25dbm and 0dbm level. This is routed to an upconverter (not visible) which brings the frequency to 2028 Mhz. This is then fed to the High Power Amplifier (Top of the rack), and then to the duplexer at the dish. The ground station at the other end is operated by the University of Maimi at Malibar, Florida. When they receive a signal from Siple Dome they then transmit back, it is received at the dish, through the duplexer, through a LNA (Low Noise Amplifier), then cabled into the box. It goes to the down converter, (which also provides 12 volts on the coax for the LNA), which brings it down to a 70 Mhz IF, and then into the modem, then the router. The modem was left operating at 32Kbps, and provides a little over 7 hours of coverage each day. New Years Day it operated from about 5:30 AM to 1 PM (and gets 4 minutes earlier each day).