The Indian Insat

Abstract

The Indian National Satellite System (Insat-1) is a multipurpose system performing three distinct functions from a single space platform. The overall system is planned to consist of (Insat, 1983):

• Two identical geostationary satellites located at 74°E and 94°E and a Master Control Facility (MCF) for command, control, and monitoring of the satellites.

• A telecommunications ground network of 31 Earth stations and a network operations control center.

• A Meteorological Data Utilization Center (MDUC), 20 secondary data utilization centers, 100 land-based and 10 ocean-based automatic unattended Data Collection Platforms (DCP), and a Disaster Warning System.

• A television broadcast system consisting of a direct broadcast of TV signals to numerous community receivers on the ground, and a terrestrial rebroadcasting system that uses the satellite to distribute TV signals from a few central facilities to numerous terrestrial transmitters.

• A radio network with uplink facilities and a large number of five channel receive only terminals for satellite radio reception and rebroadcast.