Celestia UK has announced that its innovative eScan technology, developed under ESA’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) Core Competitiveness and Sunrise Partnership Project programme, has successfully tracked and continuously received and processed a downlink signal from the Low Earth Orbit satellite JoeySat, which is operated by its partner Eutelsat OneWeb.
The Proto-1 Gateway developed by Celestia UK used innovative beam steering capability to track and process the signals sent from JoeySat satellite when pointing to the Gateway for a number of passes over Dundee Satellite Station.
The successful operation, which was witnessed by ESA and Eutelsat OneWeb, showed that the signal-to-noise ratio was maintained without drops allowing reception and demodulation of the modulated signals.
Signal integrity was maintained, as the satellite signal was tracked from one phased array to another during JoeySat trajectory, and smooth phased array handover was demonstrated with no loss of modem lock nor degradation of the signal.
The successful test marks the last stage of the prototyping phase and the start of the pre-production project which will deliver a multi-beam phased array gateway for satcom gateway / teleport applications that will be the first of its kind in the world.
This powerful and agile new technology will solve the challenges faced by the increasing number of satellites to be tracked in the rapidly growing LEO constellation environment. It represents a new generation of gateway ground terminal with no moving parts for increased reliability and downtime, minimal footprint requirements and the ability to be connected to multiple multi-orbit satellites providing full 2.5 GHz instantaneous bandwidth in Ka-band, simultaneous Left Hand and Right Hand polarisations with high EIRP and G/T.