Flat Panel to the Rescue: Antenna Manufacturers Invest in Emerging Technologies to Meet New Demands

It’s all about the form factor. Flat panel antenna (FPA) is not a term widely loved in a competitive industry where everyone wants to brand their own technology — electronically steered arrays, fragmented aperture, metamaterial surfaces. But it’s useful nonetheless, because it zeros in on what all these transformative technologies have in common — an antenna that doesn’t require a dish and can therefore be fitted to planes, trains and automobiles with minimal engineering or compliance issues.

“The low profile of these antennas allows them into market verticals like aerospace or rail where there are very stringent engineering or regulatory requirements,” says Daniel Welch of Valour Consultancy, which covers the mobile communications market.

Those growing markets will generate nearly $17 billion in FPA equipment revenues over the next decade, according to predictions from NSR.

But it’s all about the physics, too. What distinguishes the various flat panel technologies is their approach to the basic engineering challenges that a new generation of antennas have to confront in a multi-orbit, multi-band, multi-network world.

For example, one of the key requirements from the new Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) constellations is “make before break.” Satellites that aren’t in Geostationary Orbit (GEO) move across the sky relative to the Earth and the users on it. LEO and MEO constellations rely on a succession of satellites flying across the sky to keep their ground terminals in contact with the network. But that means, to maintain continuous network connectivity, terminals for those constellations need to be able to make the connection with the next satellite ascending in the sky before their connection with the previous satellite descending is broken as it falls below the horizon.

“You have satellites that are rising and setting in minutes,” explains Jake Sauer, vice president and general manager of Tactical Solutions for Ball Aerospace. “And the ability to connect into this constellation, uninterrupted, places demands for the antennas to be more agile, to be able to make a link before it breaks a link, so that the data feed is not interrupted.”

That means either an antenna capable of simultaneously forming multiple beams or one that can switch beams from one satellite to another fast enough to maintain network connectivity. “The biggest advantage of the electronically steered antenna is that it can change its directivity electronically, which can happen in times that are measured faster than milliseconds,” says Sauer.

Bill Milroy, chairman and CTO of ThinKom Solutions, says that even millisecond transitions might involve some packet loss. “Very fast isn’t fast enough, if your use case can’t drop a [single] packet,” he says. ThinKom uses a hybrid technology called variable inclination continuous transverse stub, or VICTS, that the company says combines the technical benefits of mechanically steered and electronically scanned arrays (ESA). For the end users who can’t lose a packet, “making the beam faster isn't going to cut it,” says Milroy. “We think the approach is to provide two simultaneous beams.”

Carl Novello, CTO of NxtComm, says that in a lab test, his company’s fragmented aperture antenna was “able to switch between GEO simulated and LEO simulated fast enough that it doesn’t drop [the data stream which forms the basis of network connectivity, called] a TCP connection.” Maintaining a transmission control protocol, or TCP connection, is considered a gold standard for continuous network connectivity.

But the multi-band world is also multi-polar. Ku-band transmissions typically use linear polarization, where the waveform moves up and down, perpendicular to the direction of transmission. But Ka-band uses circular polarization, where the waveform advances corkscrew-style, around the direction of transmission.

To be truly agile in the multi-orbit world, says Neville Meijers, Kymeta's chief strategy and marketing officer, antennas need to be able to switch their polarity in software so as to make the change instantaneous.

The company recently demonstrated this capability to the U.S. Department of Defense, Meijers says, “Today, we can move between a GEO and a LEO network. We know in a practical sense that we can actually do it and it works.”

Kymeta technology uses the unusual physical properties of metamaterials to build antennas that generate a holographic beam, and can be controlled using the technology developed for liquid crystal display screens. “We are leveraging the huge investments made in flat panel display technology,” says Lilac Muller, Kymeta's vice president of product management.

But the challenges for the new generation of antennas aren’t just in orbit, Ball Aerospace’s Sauer says, they’re also on the ground, at sea, and in the air — where users are increasingly demanding high bandwidth, always-on connectivity for fast moving and quickly maneuvering platforms. “Frankly, the real demands on antennas are driven, not by the challenges of tracking a satellite across the sky, even in LEO, but by the dynamic situations of the users, for example, when military platforms do extreme maneuvers, that will that will be much more dynamic from an antenna point of view than the satellites moving across the sky,” he explains.

Each of the flat panel technologies addresses these challenges differently, Valour’s Welch says, but many are working toward what he calls the antenna holy grail, a single piece of equipment able to access connectivity from multiple constellations.

“The ideal is one terminal to meet many networks,” he says. For the user, “That's an absolute godsend” because they don’t have to worry about being locked in to a vendor — a roll of the dice in an uncertain multi-constellation future.

Especially for new users, vendor lock-in can represent a big risk, he says. “If you look at it historically, how likely is it that the companies leading the charge today, in this LEO and MEO environment, will still be there by the time those constellations are mainstream? Historically, statistically, it's unlikely. We’ve seen a lot of bankruptcies.”

And there’s the rub, because, as ever, beyond the form factor and the physics, towering over the technology, there’s the business model.

“In some respects, the technical stuff is the easiest part of the equation,” observes NxtComm’s Novello. “The hard question is, how do you build a business? How do you scale it? And the way you can do that is by having a keen understanding of what problems you're solving for the end user.”

The challenge there is, as Valour’s Welch points out, is that every end user has different problems. “Every vertical that these new LEO or MEO ventures aim to capture or appeal to, has very different needs, very different specifications that they're working to,” he says.

Even within a single industry vertical there can be different use cases. In aerospace, for example, commercial jetliners require a high bandwidth, high reliability connection for their in-flight entertainment and passenger connectivity. But, depending on which routes they fly, they might also need a low-data, but no-fail connection for emergency beacons or other safety of life communications.

Ball Aerospace’s Sauer says they are addressing the broad variety of end user demand through a modular-based approach, which assembles a customer specific terminal solution from a selection of off the shelf sub-arrays. “By sharing the sub arrays between military and commercial users, we have enough volume now to get the cost down,” he says.

Because the software is also modular, Sauer says that the approach enables them to future proof their terminals. “Just to be clear, a lot of these proliferated LEO players haven't necessarily been determined yet …. what final requirements they'll have for the antennas,” he points out. Software-defined antennas can be adapted to meet new requirements.

Companies like Ball and NxtComm are iterating on proven technologies, says Welch. “It is proven, it is believed and so also the route to market is clear and not too long.” Others, like Satixfy and Isotropic, are attempting to leapfrog the competition to next generation capabilities. “There's a lot more risk around developing a new technology — they may never get to market. But those that do, they'll be well positioned to be successful.”

“I don't envy a flat panel antenna manufacturer today,” sums up NSR President and COO Brad Grady. “There's lots of bumps in the road in order to get to success.”

One bright spot in the antenna market, he says, is the government and military vertical. In the antenna market, where commercial use cases, especially consumer ones, are driven primarily by price, government and military customers are making a different cost calculation, Grady says, “Cost has these other dimensions [for these customers]. If I can have an antenna that does multi-orbit, that can reach both commercial constellations and national ones, that means I can reduce my ground infrastructure, it means I can replace the weight or power or space that another antenna would take up with food or fuel or bullets.”

Government or military users often also have higher requirements for reliability, especially in extreme environmental conditions, which also helps to drive innovative technologies, adds Welch. “Now, more than ever, they understand the value of resiliency, of redundancy, in satcom,” he says.

But the differential cost calculation sword might cut both ways in the antenna market, Grady warns, as new end users start to look at their lifetime ownership costs — especially since some of the new antenna technologies are rather power-hungry, both in primary and secondary functions.

“Like a high end laptop, the ability of an FPA to perform is frequently limited by its ability to cool itself down,” Grady says.

With energy prices rising, “I think some customers are starting to realize this thing uses a lot of power,” he said. Customers might find that improved performance and higher bandwidth came at the cost of higher energy usage. “I'm basically shifting money that I was spending out of my right pocket to my left pocket, but I haven't really changed anything.”

High energy costs might also prove yet another barrier to satellite providers getting into the ultra-low cost market for broadband connectivity in deprived rural areas, Grady points out.

Because the business model eclipses both physics and form factor, the biggest changes in the antenna market are going to be driven, not by new technologies or cutting edge manufacturing techniques, but by the emergence of the non-GEO constellations — and the tens or even hundreds of millions of new users they will bring to the game.

But that dominance means there’s a huge question mark over the future of the antenna market — the question of vertical integration.

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation has decided to manufacture its user terminals in-house, for example. That decision last year led to a fever of speculation that vertically integrating into mega-constellations would be the only future for antenna makers. But Valour’s Welch believes that Starlink is unique because of its scale and the capital it has available.

Amazon may be comparable, as another vertically integrated hyper-scale constellation with a hugely deep-pocketed patron. But the other new LEO constellation operators, including OneWeb Welch noted, had all opted for a multi-vendor strategy, driven, he suggested, by the huge variety of use cases they were trying to serve. “That multi-vendor strategy is a product of the complexity on the terminal side that they're having to meet, the different requirements, the variants, the sizes and form factors they have to build in order to work in this application or that one.”

Antenna manufacturers will increasingly have a choice to make, believes NSR’s Grady. On the one hand, enterprise markets will continue to demand higher performance, “In that world, you must have the best, most exquisite, most efficient RF performance relative to some unit cost, because all you're being evaluated against is other antennas.”

But, on the other hand, vertically integrated mass consumer markets, “which are not totally optimized from an antenna perspective, because customers are buying the antenna plus service. It's more of a total cost of ownership kind of metric from their point of view.”

“If you're in a consumer broadband class market, it's the race to the lowest price point possible. There's very little ability to create value differentiation by having a better widget,” Grady adds.

At the end of the day, Grady says, broader decisions about the network are going to drive antenna technology adoption. “We see that choices about which network you want to be on are going to dictate the choice of terminal. The antenna is a piece of the pie, not the center of the puzzle,” he says. VS