Picking the winners in large-scale ground-vehicle satcom-on-the-move deployments

Abstract

United States military planners are making plans for large scale deployment of on-the-move satellite communication systems. Current thinking calls for broad capability at both commercial Ku bands as well as military Ka bands. How this will really play out depends on many factors in the satellite industry that are uncertain. These factors include installed satellite capacity and loading factors, final resolution of several sets of proposed regulation standards, the degree (or lack) of enforcement of those standards, and the size of future on-the-move budgets. Nobody really knows what will happen, but the stakes are high. As a result, there are many antenna hardware configurations now offered or on the drawing board that will be winners in some scenarios and losers in others. For the purposes of this investigation, on-the-move antennas are grouped by several major defining characteristics (such as height and cost). How these categories fair under different scenarios is then discussed.