Further, the additional data from other sensors increases the applications of the satellites and the users who receive the signal.
Each sensor using the LRPT is considered an application and provided a percentage of the transmission bandwidth in the form of a virtual channel.
The packetized application system provides the flexibility to transmit and receive new types of data in the future using the same hardware.
The datastream is processed using a Reed–Solomon error correction, then convolution encoded, interleaved, and padded with unique synchronization words.
This yields a raw datarate of 368,640 bit/s; approximately ten times greater than the allocated bandwidth.
[3] NOAA-19, launched on 6 February 2009 and still operating as of March 2018, is the last NOAA satellite to carry the old analog automatic picture transmission (APT) system, which dates back to the 1960s.
At one point, NOAA indicated it would move to a system such as LRPT on future vehicles, but after the NPOESS program was replaced with JPSS in February 2010, NOAA decided to eliminate Low Rate Data (LRD) transmissions from JPSS.