Quickstart Guide

This is a guide generated by Starman on the Discord. It's somewhat WIP and I need to review it, but it's a start!

• 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).

• 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.

• The transmit power slider (and resulting Transmitter Power figure in Watts) is how much power you're pumping into radio waves. More power can improve signal strength, but costs more electricity.

• 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 omnis, inferior to the cheaper, lighter Communotron 16.

• 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 transmission cone.

• Higher-tech-level antennas can do more rate halvings. Each rate halving lets you extend your range at the cost of bandwidth. This is how New Horizon's X-band dish could have 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.