Having recently completed a successful over-the-air demonstration of its dual-beam Ka-band active phased array terminal, CesiumAstro is making strides in its work to flight-qualify the hardware, telling Runway Girl Network the kit will be installed and trialed by Airbus on board a commercial A320 next year, and that it plans to formally enter the commercial IFC market “in early 2025”.
The electronically steerable antenna will be delivered to Airbus for the demonstration in the third quarter of this year. Once installed on the A320, the ESA is expected to undergo a series of tests “including performance under a newly designed, lower profile radome, connectivity in-flight to determine reliability and data throughput rates, and multi-orbit switching in-flight”, says a CesiumAstro spokesperson.
“For the Airbus demonstration CesiumAstro will use a Gilat modem, but we use an open standard protocol to easily integrate any commercial modem that adheres to that standard (OpenAMIP),” the spokesperson reveals. These tests are scheduled to be completed by early to mid-2024.
When asked how CesiumAstro’s ESA compares to other dual-beam ESAs under development (for instance by Gilat, SatixFy, and Get SAT), and what are its unique differentiators, the firm says: “Our dual-beam technology will enable simultaneous connectivity across satellites within the same constellation/same orbital plane, or different constellations in different orbits. Our key differentiator is the true scalability of the ESA. The baseline of our technology is the individual ‘tile’ that can be scaled up or down in size to fit on a variety of host platforms such as drones, helicopters, business jets, and commercial aircraft.”
There is chatter in the market that ESAs in revenue service right now have poorer drag than traditional antenna installs that include a radome. Indeed, VICTS antenna maker ThinKom Solutions suggests in a blog post that there is a “dramatic drag increase from flat-top ESAs” which comes from “their sharp edges and flat surfaces. Rather than facilitating efficient aerodynamic flow across the radome, these features — while lowering the profile — increase turbulence and create shock waves.”
CesiumAstro says its ESA “will be one of the thinnest ESAs on the market, currently only 4 inches high with plans to further reduce that profile in half”. It admits that the radome solutions on the market “are a lagging technology to the ESAs themselves” but suggests they “will eventually catch up to the lower profile antennas resulting in less drag”. CesiumAstro adds that it’s also studying an integrated radome solution with its antenna which will further reduce the profile.
The Austin, Texas-headquartered firm’s ESA hardware covers both the commercial and military Ka-band frequencies — on the latter front, it is set to demo its terminal aboard a U.S. Air Force MQ9A Reaper unmanned aerial system — and as such, it is intended to be “dual use” for both military and commercial customers.
“Due to the true scalability of the ESA, we will serve commercial aviation, business aviation, and defense aircraft,” says the CesiumAstro spokesperson, adding:
We are in talks with several IFC service providers and have deliberately designed the terminal to be agnostic to service provider and satellite network operator to allow the customer the maximum flexibility to choose the service of their choice.
In the meantime, testing continues apace. Together with SES and Hughes, CesiumAstro recently announced the successful over the-air demonstration of its hardware. Conducted in June and July in Austin, the demonstration paired the company’s medium form factor terminal with a Hughes HM400 software-defined modem connecting through a SES GEO satellite.
The CesiumAstro terminal “seamlessly connected with SES’s satellite on both stationary and mobile platforms, demonstrating transmit and receive link closure to the satellite, and to a Hughes ground station in Woodbine, Maryland,” CesiumAstro says in a statement.
“The CesiumAstro team surfed the Internet as well as streamed full-motion video and a live webcam feed from the terminal to a remote site, replicating the required capabilities of commercial inflight connectivity and UAS intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions.”
CesiumAstro expects to see more programme successes over the next six months as its team completes its next set of demonstrations for the terminal, including the aforementioned A320 flight-testing with Airbus. The company tells RGN it intends to enter commercial IFC “in early 2025”.
Airbus, meanwhile, has rather famously uncoupled antenna hardware from IFC service in its new supplier-furnished Airspace Link HBCplus programme. It selected Safran Passenger Innovations to supply both the Ka-band and Ku-band terminals; the former will feature ThinKom’s popular Ka2517 VICTS antenna as core and the latter will feature Get SAT’s AeroLesa electronically steerable antenna.
Whilst the airframer has indicated it is staying flexible on the notion of adding more managed service providers to HBCplus (in addition to Inmarsat-now-Viasat, SES, Intelsat and Panasonic Avionics), Airbus executives seemed a little less interested in extending that flexibility to the hardware side of the programme when queried on the subject during the recent APEX/IFSA Global EXPO in Long Beach. As such, it remains to be seen if Airbus will further open up the programme to new terminals in the near-term. It is, however, clearly keeping an eye on how technology is evolving.
Related Articles:
- Safran sits pretty as Airbus breaks vertical integration of IFC
- Airbus adds Intelsat and Panasonic as MSPs for supplier-furnished IFC
- Gilat aims to differentiate with multi-orbit dual-beam aero ESA
- OneWeb postpones inflight connectivity service launch to early 2024
- Hughes on target to flight-test ESA for Gogo Business in 2H 2024
- Stellar Blu Solutions advances STC work for multi-orbit ESA
- Airbus surprises with pact to add SES on supplier-furnished IFC
- OneWeb focuses on B2B aero model; ESAs for Gen 1 and Gen 2 network
- Hanwha Phasor touts in-house chip work as key differentiator for ESA
All images credited to CesiumAstro
