Exploring the Impacts of Today’s SATCOM Industry Trends on Tomorrow’s RF Architecture Designs

In this webinar, we will explore how the number of devices that need to maintain mission-critical satellite communications (SATCOM) has rapidly grown over the last four decades and how this growth is scaling immensely today as the commercial adoption of smallsats, or satellites weighing less than 500 kg, is quickly gaining momentum. Additionally, as smallsats are being used for more applications ranging from asset tracking to providing wide-spread high-speed Internet to security and defense operations, demand is quickly escalating for satellites that can transfer more data at faster speeds.

SATCOM design engineers are responding to this demand by pushing through the X and Ku bands to operate these devices in the Ka and V bands. Therefore, in addition to focusing on how to reduce size, weight, and power (SWaP) while also delivering increased data transfer speeds and throughput, these engineers also have new challenges to face to operate at mmWave frequencies.

During the webinar, we will go into more detail on the recent trends driving the adoption of smallsats as well as the resulting RF challenges around designing smallsats including the following:

• Shifting from using a traditional heterodyne architecture to a direct RF sampling approach to reduce SWaP
• Avoiding interference in tighter spaces as systems inherently need to be more compact to accommodate for shorter wavelengths as operating frequencies increase
• Moving away from static mechanically steered parabolic antennas to designing active phased array antennas

We will also touch on how, because of our long history designing components used in a variety of space applications, we are well-positioned to help you overcome these challenges.