h (Rand Simberg) wrote in message . ..
On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 13:13:08 CST, in a place far, far away,
(Henry Spencer) made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

I'm told that the component-qualification rules for undersea-cable
repeaters make space-qualification procedures look amateurish.

It would be interesting, then to know how they compare to, say,
satellite transponders in terms of cost per pound.

From:
http://davidw.home.cern.ch/davidw/public/SubCables.html

"Repeaters are devices which are 100-200 cm long, 30-50 cm in
diameter, weigh about 300-500 kg and cost 500-1000 K$ each. They are
assembled in clean-rooms and typically designed for a lifetime of 25
years at up to 7000 meters depth without maintenance. "

So they are about $2000/kg. Of course, since weight is not a big
concern to them, perhaps the right metric is cost per equivalent
functionality. This would be best obtained from the first generation
of optical repeaters, which did optical-electrical-optical, which is
much more analogous to a satellite transponder.

Lou Scheffer