On-orbit results for radial distances between collocated GEO satellites for RF analysis

Because the GEO belt is becoming more and more crowded every day, controlling the number of satellites in the same control box is becoming more common. There are different kinds of collocation strategies to control more than two satellites in the same box, such as (1) eccentricity and inclination separation or (2) longitude separation. TURKSAT has been using option (1) for a long time. In this paper, we demonstrated TURKSAT on-orbit experience to show mainly radial distances between the satellites. The motivation of this study is to demonstrate how often the satellites are becoming behind of each other, which can be used for RF colocation analysis. Most of the cases the worst case for RF interference analysis between two collocated satellites is having zero distance in normal and tangential but having a radial distance only. In this study, based on the radial distance thresholds, the noninterfered link availability is also shown.