Yea.
What he said.
Bagster
What possible advantage is gained by moving your observation platform 22,000 miles further away? Geostationary does not offer an advantage for optical because the LEO birds can easily track a moving frame of reference. At that distance the diffraction limit is not your friend.
For synthetic aperture radar a high ground speed is essential.
I don’t get it.
Yea.
What he said.
Bagster
It’s the enormous gain of the 300ft+ dish antennas that fold out similar to an umbrella.
They stay exactly on station and several of them give you coverage of the entire earth...plus there are spares.
23,000 miles is NOTHING when you have that much DB gain.
It’s as though they have a nice quality receiver in every square yard on the earth with a whip antenna for reception.
Now just imagine what you could listen to AND transmit to?
And simple talking and listening is only a fraction of the workload of these sats.
You could for instance add microwatt level rf i/o to any innocuous looking IC chip and send/receive data from it.
Cameras placed in ordinary everyday objects draining so little power they can operate for years....be made to look like tiny rocks and scattered all over the place. They could wake up a fraction of a second every 20-30 seconds and if nothing is happening shut down to an unbelievably lo power drain to conserve battery life....leaving only a timer and motion detector operating.
Sophisticated weaponry would be assumed to be watched over by these sats to track location. i.e. If it is in the wrong location and someone tries to use it it will refuse to function.
There is almost certainly a contingency to spin one of the sats around and point to out at space to act as an emergency platform for the deep Space Communications system. i’e’ You could easily control the rover and orbiters at Mars with one of these.
Of Course, this is ALL just speculation based on open-sources of information.
>>What possible advantage is gained by moving your observation platform 22,000 miles further away?<<
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Uhh ... more convenient/wider footprint for TV broadcast (not two-way communications; delay too annoying).
The same limitation applies for real-time interactive data, such as battlefield. It’s half a second for round trip including response, at speed of light. Way too slow.