Astrocast, another route to the space IoT

In some of my previous post, I did talk on Kineis IoT satellite solution. The competition is that area is large and one of the other player is Astrocast. I really thanks them for getting me in the program to explore this technology (and I apology to have been a bit long to start using it).

Astrocast is a Swiss company launching nanosatellites to currently provide Europe, Asia, Africa coverage for IoT. It uses L-Band (1-2 GHz) radio. The transmission period will be 15 minutes once the constellation will be fully deployed. The current constellation is 10 satellites for a target of 100 satellites by 2025.

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First IoT frame sent to space with Kineis devkit

The Kineis IoT solution is an IoT network based on satellite’s communications. Thank to it, a device can communicate from any point of Earth with a single technology. Kineis is using an existing fleet of Argos satellites launched during the last 40 years and is already commercially available. This fleet will grow fast in the next two years to offer a communication window up to 4 times per hour.

In this blog post, I’m going to detail my first experience with Kineis for sending frames through the satellites of the fleet. I’ve been using a KIM Arduino Devkit. The on-boarding is quite fast, let’s see this!

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Satellite’s IoT is now ready for use with Kineis

Kineis nano-sat Photo credit Kinéis et Héméria

Even if you think it is the first time you heard about Kineis, you are basically wrong in some ways ! This company is a recent “Startup”, existing since June 2019 but for real, they are managing an IoT offer based on top the famous and quite experienced Argos system, started in 1978 and now operating more the 22.000 devices running application like animal tracking, ocean safety and many scientific programs.
The service is running over the 8 satellites currently in orbit, making Kineis the most advanced satellite IoT solution commercially available as of today.

Thanks to the polar orbit of the satellites, the whole earth is covered, no white zone, no blind spots from pole to pole, ocean to desert, device are communicating from everywhere, autonomously.

This blog post is the first of a series made with the help of Kineis to introduce you the technology and my experience with it. As usual, there is no sponsoring for these blog posts but a close work with Kineis as the offer is only open to business companies currently.

Companies like Exotic Systems, Arribada or Advanced Tracking, have already started to make products using Kineis network for asset tracking applications mainly.

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