Laser vs RF Downlink — Pointing Precision Tradeoff

A satellite beams data to a ground station using two coexisting downlinks: a traditional RF antenna and an optical laser terminal. Both share the same simulated pointing jitter and atmospheric turbulence. The RF beam is wide and forgiving — it stays locked across almost any jitter level, but its data rate is modest and roughly constant. The laser beam is razor-thin and can carry dramatically more data when perfectly aligned, but the same jitter that RF ignores walks it off the receiver, dropping the link to zero until it reacquires — unless active fine-pointing correction is engaged to track out the error. Toggle fine-pointing and drag the jitter slider to see the throughput-versus-robustness tradeoff play out live on the chart.