New flat panel satellite antennas hitting the market.

AuthorMagnuson, Stew

A pair of startups are poised to introduce radically new satellite antennas that have the potential to alter the look of military air, land and sea platforms.

Electronically steered flat panel antennas are intended to replace the round, parabolic receivers/transceivers that jut up from ships, commandand-control vehicles and aircraft.

"The low profile I think is going to be attractive to the government market," said Mark Daniels, vice president of new technologies and services for Intelsat General, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intelsat.

Intelsat is not developing or manufacturing the new wave of antennas, but is investing in at least two companies that intend to introduce the new technology within the next year: Phasor Inc. of Arlington, Virginia, and Kymeta Corp. of Redmond, Washington.

The commercial communications satellite giant has been launching powerful new satellites that are capable of exponentially higher throughputs than previous spacecraft. Taking advantage of the higher throughputs will require increasing the radius of the traditional antennas, which many current and potential customers can't do because of size, weight and power restrictions, Daniels explained in an interview.

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Intelsat needs to invest in companies pursuing flat panel antennas in order to open up new markets and allow existing customers to increase their throughputs, he added.

One of those potential markets is small business-class jets. The radome that protects the parabolic antenna from bird strikes and makes it more aerodynamic has to be part of the structure of the aircraft.

"The bigger they are, the more they stick up and the worse they are for aircraft," he said.

Flat panel antennas are scalable and since they are flat, there are no aerodynamic or bird-strike problems. "On top of a fuselage, you can get throughputs higher than what you get with parabolics," he said. "It opens up an entire new market for Intelsat to address."

Phased-array antennas are another means that the military can use to transmit and receive communications on aircraft. They are flat and spread out--as the name suggests--in an array. However, they require mechanical means to move the antennas to track the satellite.

Daniels said the new flat panel antennas don't have moving parts. They keep track of satellites electronically.

"The parabolics that are on land vehicles today are pretty beefy to withstand the environment,"...

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