Satellite communications system with frequency channelized beams

A communications system of the type including a plurality of accessing and receiving ground stations which communicate with each other via a satellite, the satellite comprising:

• means for receiving a plurality of digital uplink signals from the accessing ground stations, the uplink signals being received as a plurality of equal bandwidth spot-beams which each comprise a plurality of frequency-divided uplink channels;
• means for demodulating and regenerating the received uplink signals;
• means for routing the demodulated and regenerated signals between a set of input terminals and a set of output terminals to generate corresponding downlink signals;
• means for modulating and amplifying the downlink signals, and
• means for transmitting the downlink signals to the receiving ground stations,
• characterized by
• means for multiplexing the signals after regeneration to form high bit rate serial downlink signals as a plurality of equal-bandwidth downlink spot-beams equal to the number of uplink spotbeams, which downlink spotbeams each comprise at least one downlink frequency channel, there being a greater number of frequency-divided uplink channels per uplink spot-beam than there are downlink frequency channels per downlink spot-beam.