Sat comms can overcome challenges to industry

Hytera, together with its subsidiary Norsat, highlights the importance of radio over satellite solutions on a global scale.

As communication requirements evolve rapidly, it has become imperative to enhance connectivity between organisations, worldwide teams and employees out in the field. Radio communications play an essential role in this regard, especially in public safety, emergency rescue, firefighting, fleet operations and mining applications.

Most radio networks use line-of-sight propagation or have fixed repeater stations. When there is no radio network signal coverage onsite, a command centre is not able to reach the personnel onsite. In this case, the use of communications satellites as a communications repeater can provide a remote cross-territory transmission route for on-site radio network communications. Sat comms can achieve voice, data and image transmission; and improve the capacities of emergency handling, decision-making, command and control, emergency linkage, resource allocation — all the while ensuring full-time, all-area and all-weather communications.

Benefits of radio-over-satellite communication

Remote radio networks can be unified with fixed landlines, cellular systems or push-to-talk (PTT) radios, facilitating encrypted, real-time direct voice and data communications to headquarters, control centres or operations rooms. With the right systems engineering and technology partner, radio-over-satellite solutions are easy to manage and deploy. They can be operated remotely and unattended after installation, making them excellent solutions for communication in uncertain environments.

Proper engineering is required to ensure audio quality, latency, jitter and bandwidth of digital radio systems over satellite. Congestion and management of remote networks can be mitigated with careful planning, QOS, SLAs, TCP acceleration and bandwidth compression.

Testing has also confirmed that there is no discernible degradation in audio quality using radio over satellite systems. Thorough planning and designing of the network, to maximise limited bandwidth usage and link budget, are required for projects involving these applications.

Potential uses

During an emergency rescue scenario, when there is no cellular network, working with a satcom solution the video and voice information can be transmitted back to the command centre, which could assist in planning accurate strategy.

In mobile backhaul, PMR and public mobile network leverage satcom systems to support high-speed backhaul traffic. Portable terminals and mobile vehicles provide bandwidth when and where needed on a temporary basis, such as a major event, a sport event or for unexpected purposes such as disaster recovery.

A satcom system covers a wide geographic area with no compromise on quality of service or cost-effectiveness, which makes a system suitable to connect nationwide offices. For remote monitoring, broadband satcom makes it possible to connect and provide real-time monitoring, such as via a maritime antenna mounted on a drilling platform and for ships at sea.