Amazon Web Services (AWS) has expanded their wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency (DigIF) support for Software Defined Radios (SDRs) to enable customers to downlink more data in less time and reduce costs. AWS Ground Station regions, as mentioned above, join the Middle East (Bahrain) region to offer customers a total of four locations where expanded support for SDRs is now available in Preview.
AWS Ground Station originally supported SDRs for narrowband frequencies less than 54 MHz. By expanding SDR support to 400 MHz, AWS can now support wideband customers who rely on new modulation and encoding schemes, helping customers such as Earth imaging businesses, universities and governments optimize their operational costs.
The expansion to new regions provides customers with additional contact opportunities to align with satellite data processing requirements. With AWS Ground Station providing DigIF output, customers can select an SDR of their choice to work with AWS Ground Station and benefit from the speed of market innovation.
These SDRs perform the modulation and encoding steps in the customer’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), giving the customer more control over their data and allowing more flexibility to move to different configurations, including higher data rates, as they scale their constellation.
AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets customers control satellite communications, process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations. Customers can integrate their space workloads with other AWS services in real-time using Amazon’s low-latency, high-bandwidth, global network.
Customers can stream their satellite data to Amazon EC2 for real-time processing, store data in Amazon S3 for low cost archiving, or apply AI/ML algorithms to satellite images with Amazon SageMaker. With AWS Ground Station, customers pay only for the actual antenna time that you use.
AWS Ground Station antennas are now available in Ohio (US), Oregon (US), Middle East (Bahrain), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Ireland), Africa (Cape Town), South America (Punta Arenas), Hawaii (US), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). Additional DigIF sites will become available in the coming months.