Aeronautical Satellite Communications at Ti Data Rates

.—— —. —— The Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS) Broadband Aeronautical Terminal was developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory together with various industry/ government partners to investigate high data rate aeronautical applications of ACTS technologies. The terminal was flown on both a C-141 and a Saberliner 50 aircraft. These flight experiments have demonstrated the viability of K/Ka-band aeronautical satellite communications at T1 data rates. Currently available commercial aeronautical satellite communications systems are only capable of achieving data rates on the order of tens of kilobits per second. The broadband terminal, used in conjunction with the ACTS mechanically steerable antenna, has achieve data rates of 768 kilobits per second, while use of an ACT-S spot beam antenna will allow data rates up to 2 megabits per second. The use of the K/Ka-band for wideband aeronautical communications has the advantages of spectrum availability and smaller antennas, while eliminating the drawback of this frequency band, rain attenuation, by flying above the clouds the majority of the time. While previous papers on this subject have addressed the terminal design this paper extends the discussion to cover the results of recently concluded flight tests.