zlacker

Alas there is no 'in general'. Acquisition is often the secret sauce due to, among other challenges, the extremely tight alignment requirement -- thermal shifts, satellite wobbling, etc, are all critical to manage.

On wavelengths, if you're trying to hit 100gbit+, you're probably having to use coherent optics, and there aren't many technology options or wavelengths on the market.

>>sepham+(OP)
You got it exactly right! I worked on a simulation model of the complete optical setup of a laser terminal with movable mirrors and all including the fricking servo motors and a simple orbital model for the relative satellite positions. Plus an interface to drop in the actual acquisition and tracking code used on the embedded control system. All of that just to be able to do reasonably realistic simulations for verification and tuning of the secret sauce.