The satellite antenna of today must fulfill an extremely diverse set of applications, and vendors are striving to meet evolving customer demands. Today, customers are looking for smaller, lightweight, more powerful antennas that will fulfill their many requirements. Satellite antennas must be highly versatile, and manufacturers must be innovative and offer enhanced features at a price that is right. It’s a balancing act, and there are some pivotal industry developments that are currently driving antenna development.
“Over the past few years, two big trends in commercial spacecraft are influencing satellite antenna manufacturers and integrators like Datapath,” says president and CEO David Myers. “The first trend has been the launch of traditional geosynchronous satellites using new high throughput designs in both Ku and Ka frequency bands. Intelsat EpicNG and Inmarsat Global Xpress are classic examples of each type. Now the second big industry trend — smaller Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations, from companies like OneWeb, do present some exciting but very real technical, cost and implementation challenges.”
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Demand has been heavily focused on terminals that are easy to transport and very easy to use so that no technicians are required to set up or to line up the antenna with the satellite. Terminals must be fast to deploy when required and that could be anywhere, from the scene of a news story to an oil exploration project to a disaster zone.
An Evolving Approach to Business
Customer demand is shaping the businesses of satellite operators and antenna manufacturers. Operators are no longer vendors of capacity, they are service providers and they are constantly re-evaluating their business models to tie in with the new capacity that is becoming available.
“Our customers are evolving today to meet the new technical and market challenges of mobile broadband services tomorrow,” says David Helfgott, CEO of Phasor. “This is wide-ranging, as thinking changes from providing capacity to providing services, from megahertz to megabits, and from shared pools and best-effort network to Committed Information Rate (CIR) based service level agreements.”
Future Growth Lies in Mobility
Large LEO satellite deployments on the horizon from OneWeb, LeoSat, and SpaceX promise a new wave of connectivity that will facilitate broadband access to moving platforms such as trains, cars, ships and aircraft. The keyword for the future is mobility.
“Customers are looking for more of everything,” explains Bill Marks, CCO and EVP of Kymeta. “The market is saying that they need to connect more devices from all mobile platforms with more data, more capacity and greater coverage.”
The FPA: The Answer to Mobility?
Flat Panel Antennas (FPAs) are increasingly viewed as the key enabler for High Throughput Satellite (HTS) and Non-Geosynchronous (NGSO) systems. In NSR’s Flat Panel Antenna Analysis report published earlier this year, the research firm highlighted that “FPAs, especially the electronically-steered variety, are a key technology for unlocking higher satellite bandwidth efficiencies with minimum weight penalty, which is critical in mobility.”
Innovation in FPA technology is moving very quickly and players such as Kymeta, Phasor and more recently, C-Com, are all poised to deliver highly inventive technologies that are aimed at meeting the demands of new generation satellite operators.
“Mechanically steered antennas are impractical and costly to use,” says Marks. “As an example, fast-moving satellites require a minimum of two antennas to maintain a continuous connection; this is costly, and difficult to maintain and install. Kymeta’s flat panel, Electronically-Steered Antenna [ESA] has no moving parts and can acquire, steer and lock a beam to any satellite.”
“The key is being flexible enough to enable the customer to solve their communication problem in a way that works for their organization,” Myers concludes. VS
