The Ku band is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum in the microwave range of frequencies from 12 to 18 gigahertz. The symbol is short for "K-under", because it is the lower part of the original NATO K band, split into three bands because of the presence of the atmospheric water vapor resonance peak at 22.24 GHz, which made the center unusable for long range transmission. In radar applications, it ranges from 12 to 18 GHz according to the formal definition of radar frequency band nomenclature in IEEE Standard 521-2002. Ku band is used for satellite communications, most notably the downlink used by direct broadcast satellites to broadcast satellite television, for specific applications such as NASA's Tracking Data Relay Satellite used for both space shuttle and International Space Station communications. Ku band satellites are used for backhauls and for satellite from remote locations back to a television network's studio for editing and broadcasting; the band is split by the International Telecommunication Union into multiple segments that vary by geographical region.

NBC was the first television network to uplink a majority of its affiliate feeds via Ku band in 1983. Some frequencies in this radio band are employed in radar guns used by law enforcement to detect vehicles speeding in Europe. Segments in most of North and South America are represented by ITU Region 2 from 11.7 to 12.2 GHz, allocated to the FSS, uplink from 14.0 to 14.5 GHz. There are more than 22 FSS Ku band satellites orbiting over North America, each carrying 12 to 48 transponders, 20 to 120 watts per transponder, requiring a 0.8-m to 1.5-m antenna for clear reception. The 12.2 to 12.7 GHz segment is allocated to the BSS. BSS carry 16 to 32 transponders of 27 MHz bandwidth running at 100 to 240 watts of power, allowing the use of receiver antennas as small as 18 inches. Segments in those regions are represented by ITU Region 1 and they are, the 11.45 to 11.7 and 12.5 to 12.75 GHz bands are allocated to the FSS. In Europe Ku band is used from 10.7 to 12.75 GHz for direct broadcast satellite services such as those carried by the Astra satellites.

The 11.7 to 12.5 GHz segment is allocated to the BSS. Australia is part of ITU Region 3 and the Australian regulatory environment provides a class license that covers downlinking from 11.70 GHz to 12.75 GHz and uplinking from 14.0 GHz to 14.5 GHz. The ITU has categorized Indonesia as Region P, countries with high rain precipitation; this statement has made many people unsure about using Ku-band in Indonesia. Using frequencies higher than 10 GHz in a heavy rain area gives poor results; this problem can be solved by using an appropriate link budget when designing the wireless communication link. Higher power can overcome the loss to rain fade. Measurements of rain attenuation in Indonesia have been done for satellite communication links in Padang, Cibinong and Bandung; the DAH Model for rain attenuation prediction is valid for Indonesia. The DAH model has become an ITU recommendation since 2001; this model can create a 99.7 % available link. Use of the Ku-band for satellite communications in tropical regions like Indonesia is becoming more frequent.

Several satellites above Indonesia have Ku-band transponders, Ka band transponders. Newskies, launched in December 2002 and positioned at 95° East, contains only Ku-band transponders with a footprint on Indonesia. NSS 6 is intended to be replaced by SES-12 at the same location, which launched in June 2018 and carries 54 Ku-band transponders; the iPSTAR satellite, launched in 2004 uses Ku band footprints. Other satellites that provides Ku band covers Indonesia are Palapa D, MEASAT 3/3A, JCSAT-4B, AsiaSat 5, ST 2, Chinasat 11, Korea Telecom Koreasat 8/ABS 2, SES-8. Other ITU allocations have been made within the Ku band to the fixed service, radio astronomy service, space research service, mobile service, mobile satellite service, radiolocation service, amateur radio service, radionavigation. However, not all of these services are operating in this band and others are only minor users. Compared with C-band, Ku band is not restricted in power to avoid interference with terrestrial microwave systems, the power of its uplinks and downlinks can be increased.

This higher power translates into smaller receiving dishes and points out a generalization between a satellite's transmission and a dish's size. As the power increases, the size of an antenna's dish will decrease; this is because the purpose of the dish element of the antenna is to collect the incident waves over an area and focus them all onto the antenna's actual receiving element, mounted in front of the dish. A major attraction of the band over lower frequency microwave bands is that the shorter wavelengths allow sufficient angular resolution to separate the signals of different communication satellites to be achieved with smaller terrestrial parabolic antennas. From the Rayleigh criterion, the diameter of a parabolic dish required to create a radiation pattern with

Francis Joseph Sheeran, known as Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran, was an American labor union official, accused of having links to the Bufalino crime family in his capacity as a high-ranking official in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the president of Local 326. Sheeran was a leading figure in the corruption of unions by organized crime. In 1980, he was convicted of labor racketeering and sentenced to 32 years in prison, of which he served 13 years. Shortly before his death, he claimed to have killed Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. Author Charles Brandt detailed what Sheeran told him about Hoffa in the narrative nonfiction work I Heard You Paint Houses; the truthfulness of the book has been disputed by some, including Sheeran's confessions to killing Hoffa and Joe Gallo. The book is the basis for the 2019 film The Irishman directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran and Al Pacino as Hoffa. Sheeran was born and raised in Darby, Pennsylvania, a small working-class borough on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

He was the son of Mary Agnes Hanson. His father was of Irish descent. Sheeran enlisted in the Army in August 1941, did his basic training near Biloxi and was assigned to the military police. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for training in the Army Airborne at Fort Benning, but he dislocated his shoulder and was transferred to the 45th Infantry Division, known as "The Thunderbirds" and "The Killer Division". On July 14, 1943, he set sail for North Africa. Sheeran served 411 days of combat duty—a significant length of time, as the average was around 100 days, his first experience of combat was during the Italian Campaign, including the invasion of Sicily, the Salerno landings, the Anzio Campaign. He served in the landings in southern France and the invasion of Germany. Sheeran said: All in all, I had fifty days lost under AWOL—absent without official leave—mostly spent drinking red wine and chasing Italian and German women. However, I was never AWOL. If you were AWOL when your unit was going back into combat you might as well keep going because one of your own officers would blow you away and they didn't have to say it was the Germans.

That's desertion in the face of the enemy. Sheeran recalled his war service as the time, he claimed to have participated in numerous massacres and summary executions of German POWs, acts which violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs. In interviews with Charles Brandt, he divided such massacres into four categories: Revenge killings in the heat of battle. Sheeran told Brandt that a German soldier had just killed his close friends and tried to surrender, but he chose to "send him to hell, too", he described witnessing similar behavior by fellow GIs. Orders from unit commanders during a mission. Sheeran described his first murder for organized crime: "It was just like when an officer would tell you to take a couple of German prisoners back behind the line and for you to'hurry back'. You did what you had to do." The Dachau reprisals and other reprisal killings of concentration camp guards and trustee inmates. Calculated attempts to degrade German POWs. Sheeran's unit was climbing the Harz Mountains when they came upon a Wehrmacht mule train carrying food and drink up the mountainside.

The female cooks were allowed to leave unmolested Sheeran and his fellow GI's "ate what we wanted and soiled the rest with our waste". The Wehrmacht mule drivers were given shovels and ordered to "dig their own shallow graves". Sheeran joked that they did so without complaint hoping that he and his buddies would change their minds, but the mule drivers were buried in the holes they had dug. Sheeran explained that by he "had no hesitation in doing what I had to do." Sheeran was discharged from the army on October 24, 1945. He recalled that it was "a day before my twenty-fifth birthday, but only according to the calendar." Upon returning from his army service, Sheeran married an Irish immigrant. The couple had three daughters, MaryAnne and Peggy, but divorced in 1968. Sheeran married Irene Gray, with whom he had one daughter, Connie; when he left the service, Sheeran became a meat driver for Food Fair, he met Russell Bufalino in 1955 when Bufalino offered to help him fix his truck, worked jobs driving him around and making deliveries.

Sheeran operated out of a bar located in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, run by Bill Distanisloa, a soldier for Angelo Bruno. Sheeran's first murder was killing Whispers DiTullio, a gangster who had hired him to destroy the Cadillac Linen Service in Delaware for $10,000. Sheeran did not know, that Angelo Bruno had a large stake in the linen service. Sheeran was brought in for questioning. Bufalino had convinced Bruno to spare Sheeran, but he ordered Sheeran to kill DiTullio as retribution. Sheeran was suspected of the murder of Joe Gallo at Umberto's Clam House on April 7, 1972. Bufalino introduced Sheeran to Teamsters International President Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa became a close friend and used Sheeran for muscle, including the assassination of recalcitrant union members and members of rival unions threatening the Teamsters' turf. According to Sheeran, the first conversation that he had with Hoffa was over the phone, where Hoffa started by saying, "I heard you paint houses"—a mob code meaning "I heard that you kill people", the "paint" being spattered blood.

Sheeran became acting president of L

The Atari 2600 branded as the Atari Video Computer System or Atari VCS for short until November 1982, is a home video game console from Atari, Inc. Released on September 11, 1977, it is credited with popularizing the use of microprocessor-based hardware and games stored on ROM cartridges instead of dedicated hardware with games physically built into the unit; the 2600 was bundled with two joystick controllers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, a game cartridge: Combat, Pac-Man. The Atari VCS launched with nine low-resolution games in 2 KiB cartridges; the system found its killer app with its version of Taito's Space Invaders in 1980 and became successful, leading to the creation of Activision and other third-party game developers as well as competition from home console manufacturers Mattel and Coleco. By the end of its primary lifecycle in 1983–84, games for the 2600 were using more than four times the ROM of the launch titles with more advanced visuals and gameplay than the system was designed for, such as Pitfall! and its scrolling sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns.

Atari invested in two games for the 2600, Pac-Man and E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the latter being a commercial failure that contributed to the video game crash of 1983 which ended the market relevance of the 2600. Warner sold off the home console division of Atari to Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel. In 1986, the new Atari Corporation under Tramiel released a lower-cost version of the 2600 and the backwards-compatible Atari 7800, but these were not enough to turn things around, it was Nintendo that led the recovery of the industry. Atari ended production of the Atari 2600 on January 1, 1992. Across the system's lifetime, an estimated 30 million units were sold. Atari was founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1972, their first major product was one of the first successful arcade games. By 1975, Atari had released a Pong home console, competing against Magnavox, the only other major producer of home consoles at the time. Bushnell recognized, the limitation of custom logic burned onto the circuit board.

Because development of a console cost at least US$100,000 and time to complete, had only about a three-month shelf life before becoming outdated, it was a risky business model. By 1974, Atari had acquired Cyan Engineering, an electronics company founded by Steve Mayer and Larry Emmons, started Atari's Grass Valley Think Tank, where they developed new ideas for arcade games. Due to Bushnell's concern about single-game consoles, the Grass Valley team started working on a home console with multi-game support. Mayer and Emmons determined that a home console would require newly invented microprocessors to support multiple games, but such microprocessors cost US$100–300 at the time, far outside the range that their market would support. In September 1975, Chuck Peddle of MOS Technology created a low-cost replacement for the Motorola 6800, the MOS Technology 6502, introduced it at the 1975 Wescon trade show in San Francisco. Mayer and Ron Milner attended the show, met with Peddle, invited Peddle to Cyan's headquarters to discuss using MOS's microprocessors for a game console.

Mayer and Milner negotiated a deal for the 6502 chips at US$8 each, sufficient to begin development of a console. Cyan and MOS enlisted Synertek, a semiconductor manufacturer whose co-founder, Bob Schreiner, was good friends with Peddle, to act as a second source for the 6507. By December 1975, Atari hired Joe Decuir to help design the first prototype, codenamed "Stella". A second prototype was completed by March 1976 with the help of Jay Miner, who had managed to fit the entire Television Interface Adaptor, to send graphics and audio to the television display, into a single chip; the second prototype included the 6507, the TIA, a ROM cartridge slot and adapter, each cartridge holding a ROM game image. Believing that Stella would be a success, Bushnell acquired the entire Grass Valley Think Tank and relocated them to Atari's new headquarters in Sunnyvale, California by mid-1976, putting Steve Mayer in charge of the project. Bushnell feared that once this unit was released, competitors would try to copy it, preemptively arranged with all integrated chip manufacturers who were interested in the games market to deny sales to his competitors.

Fairchild Semiconductor introduced its Fairchild Channel F home console in November 1976, beating Atari to the market with ROM cartridge technology. This pressured Atari to finish Stella more but the company lacked the funds to do so. Bushnell considered taking Atari public but instead sold the company to Warner Communications for US$28 million. By 1977, the product had advanced far enough to brand it as the "Atari Video Computer System" and engage Atari's programmers to develop games for it; the unit was showcased in mid-1977 at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show with plans for retail release in October. However, Atari encountered production problems during its first batch, its testing was complicated by the use of cartridges; the consoles were shipped to retailers in November 1977. At release in September 1977, the unit was priced at US$199, shipped w