Rendering of a receive-only ground station based on ThinKom’s Digital Array technology. Photo: ThinKom

ThinKom and KSAT are partnering with the goal of improving operational efficiency for their Earth Observation (EO) customers. The two companies will develop a commercially viable receive-only ground station, with the goal to improve overall network capacity. The two companies made the announcement, Sept. 23.

Under the agreement, ThinKom will develop a Ka-band version of ThinKom’s scalable Digital Array that enables multi-beam, multi-orbit, multi-constellation operation via a modular, waveform-agnostic, open architecture for global deployment of ground stations. The core antenna module uses an active phased array design based on ThinKom’s patented Ultra technology.

KSAT will evaluate multi-beam performance of the ThinKom solution, simultaneously tracking and processing wideband Ka-band downlinks from multiple satellites. Program testing will be performed in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Program from ThinKom’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

“At KSAT, we take pride driving and adopting new technology solutions and continuously striving to improve the efficiency of our global satellite ground station network. Phased array antennas have been around quite a while and offer enormous potential, however, finding solutions that meet the demanding requirements of our Earth Observation tracking ground stations has proven challenging. We are excited to partner with ThinKom on their solution and look forward to collaborating with NOAA to evaluate its performance against the JPSS satellites,” John Heskett, CTO-KSAT, said in a statement.