Cobham SB-Helo X-Stream to Improve Satellite Communications from Helos in the Air
By Frank Wolfe | March 8, 2019
United Nations workers in Somalia disembark from an Mi-8MTV helicopter in November 2014. Photo: United Nations
Inmarsat is set to approve satellite communication rates for a new waveform, developed by Cobham last year, that promises to bolster significantly beyond-line-of-sight communications for helicopters in the air.
Spinning rotors can drastically disrupt satcom signals, a signal degradation known as “rotor shadow” that leads to up to 40 percent packet loss for satcom data, according to Cobham. There have been some workarounds in the past, yet they are expensive, and the new system by Cobham and Inmarsat, the SB-Helo X-Stream, may prove to be just one-quarter the operational cost of those workarounds, according to Cobham.