With the growing demand for portable VSAT terminals particularly from military users, the need for more portable power amplifiers is becoming an important criterion in terminal design.

“One of the challenges we have right now is everyone wants to do communications-on-the-move,” Norsat International Inc. Vice President of Operations Amiee Chan told Satellite News. Users “want to be able to move around. They want to have a satellite terminal deployed on the fly. They want to be able to pack everything up in a suitcase.”

And one way that Norsat is helping to facilitate the design and development of smaller, more portable terminals is its recently introduced solid-state power amplifiers (SSPAs). According to an announcement from the company last week, the company describes its new product line of SSPAs, available in 8W, 10W, 20W, 25W and 50W, as “the smallest and lightest high-powered transmitters in the marketplace.”

“We surveyed the market in terms of types of power amplifiers that were out there,” Chan said, noting that most did not meet portability needs. “They were relatively bulky and they were quite heavy. With power amplifiers, they tend to generate a lot of heat so they typically have a big design to help dissipate the heat.”

So in response to this, Norsat developed a small, lightweight SSPA. The company’s engineers “have optimized the design such that given the fans that we use and the heat sinks that we have and the power combining technology that we use, these all work together to reduce the size and the weight of the unit,” Chan said.

She pointed particularly to the heat reduction on the smaller units as a key design feature.

“If [a terminal] is running overheated all the time,” its performance and lifespan is diminished, Chan said. “If you design enough ways to get the heat away from the device, the device will have a [longer] lifetime.”

–Gregory Twachtman (Amiee Chan, Norsat, 604/292-9000)