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COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF SATCOM REQUIREMENTS
By Editor | July 1, 2009
Customers do not differentiate between the types of communications services they need by dividing them between high capacity and low capacity, military or commercial. He is concerned with doing business and having the communications resources he or she needs when they need them in order to accomplish the task at hand. To ensure that the customer will have the right information at their disposal, a common set of system characteristics are needed to support business operations.
1) Interoperability: Satellite communications systems are a component of the overall global information infrastructure. They must inter-operate beyond the local geographical area of operations into the overall information net. Through the use of teleports and gateways SATCOM can extend the range of information in order to support business operations. The procurement of common satellite ground terminals will aid in the effort for complete interoperability with other systems and services.
2) Global Coverage: Services need the capability to access communications support from any location around the world including the Polar Regions. Experience from past recent experience has shown that businesses being engaged in concurrent, multiple, regional and simultaneous communications is high. Services rely on SATCOM systems to support continuous operations worldwide, and to accommodate, simultaneously, widely dispersed offices in various stages of employment.
3) Assured Access: Services need assured access to SATCOM services to exercise positive management and control to disseminate business intelligence and operational information. A manager’s access to these services must, therefore, be available on demand for the duration of business life. Assured, real-time access to satellite communications capabilities allows the managers to collect and disseminate information and execute management directives rapidly enough to operate before the competition can react.
4) Flexibility: The IT manager needs the ability to adjust supporting space and terrestrial-based communications capabilities to match the dynamics of the operational environment. This requires flexibility in each segment of the SATCOM system. Satellite repositioning, terminal mobility, frequency selection, and system resource allocation represent different options allowing the user and system manager flexibility in responding to rapidly changing operations, threats, and geographic needs. Satellites are designed to operate reliably and dependably throughout their expected operational life spans. Satellites generally have a projected lifetime of about ten years. New generation satellites being launched in 1997 can have estimated lifetimes of 12-15 years. This is achieved through quality control and through testing of parts and subsystems before they are actually installed on a satellite and launched. Often, redundancy is built into key parts of the satellite so that if one part fails, another can perform its functions.
Communications satellites are launched and maneuvered into their proper orbits by rockets. Today the overwhelming percentages of communication satellites are maintained in geosynchronous orbit approximately 22,300 miles above the earth. There are other satellites in other kinds of orbits that perform specific functions or cover areas of the earth in ways that cannot be done with geosynchronous satellites.
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