Quickstart Guide - KSP-RO/RealAntennas GitHub Wiki

This is a guide generated to help new users of Real Antennas (RA) get on their feet.

  • To enable the antenna planner, find the "Antenna Planning" button, enable that, then select the "Antenna Planning GUI" button to select what body you want to plan for (relative to Deep Space Network stations on Earth). You can also plan your power usage by simulating how often the antenna will be transmitting through the Active Transmission Time slider.

  • Duplicate antennas do nothing. While having different types of antennas is often very very useful (for example, a interplanetary relay may use a VHF omni to communicate to a lander and an S-band dish to communicate back the Earth-based DSN stations), multiple of the same antenna will not improve your connection. The only time you might want to have multiple of the same antenna is if you plan on targeting multiple dishes to different targets (for example, if you're setting up a comm net constellation).

  • Keep an eye on the gain. Higher is better, and means more efficient conversion of electricity into radio waves going towards the target. A gain greater than 5 dBi is considered a directional antenna by the game and needs to be targeted.

  • The transmit power slider (and resulting Transmitter Power figure in Watts) is how much power you're pumping into radio waves when actively transmitting. More power can improve signal strength, but costs more electricity. This does not change your idle power, which can only be changed through tech levels.

  • The tech level slider should be left at maximum available; this reduces inefficiency (measured as power consumption minus transmitter power). Unfortunately, right now you need to go to the R&D center, right-click on RA tech level upgrades, and purchase them from there, despite the fact that it doesn't seem to deduct any money.

  • The RF band refers to the frequency of radio waves you're using. Go read the band article. There are tradeoffs here. UHF and VHF are present at all ground stations (not just the DSN stations), and cap out at 50 kbps. S, X, and K bands are (currently) only available at Canberra in Australia, Madrid in Spain, and Goldstone in California, but can be substantially more power-efficient, and cap out at 330 kbps, 1360 kbps, and 20000 kbps, respectively.

  • Don't try VHF/UHF Dishes. They just wind up being terrible omnidirectionals, inferior to the cheaper, lighter Communotron 16.

  • Don't try S-band+ Omni to Omni. While you may have a higher data rate, the signal will fall off with distance much faster than VHF/UHF omnis. (Omni to Dish can use any frequency)

  • Increase your band frequency and dish diameter. Wider-diameter dishes operating at higher-frequency bands (K > X > S) have superior gain at the cost of a narrower beamwidth, which is measured in degrees of angular diameter of the primary cone.

  • You can go past your beamwidth. Going past your beamwidth will give you a dB penalty, but it will still work up to a point. This can be seen with the 2 cones coming from your Antenna in the map view. The smaller primary (dark pink) cone is 1 beamwidth in angular diameter, while the larger secondary (light pink) cone is 2 beamwidths in angular diameter. The edge of your primary cone has a 3 dB penalty (2x less reception), while the edge of your secondary cone has a 10 dB penalty (10x less reception), with scaling in between. Past that, the dB penalty increases sharply. If you wish to find the minimum altitude at which you can use with a certain beamwidth and still have the entire Earth in your primary cone, use this formula:$$H_{OrbitHeight}=R_{EarthRadius}\left(\frac{1}{\sin\left(\frac{Beamwidth}{2}\right)}-1\right)$$

  • Higher-tech-level antennas can do more rate halvings. Each rate halving lets you extend your range by 1.4x (√2) at the cost of bandwidth. The percentage values for your transmission/reception present when hovering over your signal in flight (the 4 bars) tells you the amount of rate halvings you have used out of your antenna's maximum. This is why New Horizon's X-band dish had 38 kb/s at Jupiter, but a mere 1 kb/s at Pluto. Note that, at least with Kerbalism, some of the higher-tech experiments can take a long time to transmit back home if you have a low bandwidth, very analogous to how New Horizons took a year to download all its Pluto flyby data back to Earth.