In 2019, I visited KVH’s headquarters in Middletown, Rhode Island, and was amazed by the network operations center. KVH manufactures cellular, Wi-Fi and satellite-communications equipment, and it manages and monitors a proprietary end-to-end network. Standing there, looking at the screens and maps, I could see every KVH-equipped vessel in the world, plus the operational status and performance metrics for each yacht’s KVH antennas.

Now, five years on, KVH is expanding its KVH One Hybrid Network by adding Eutelsat OneWeb’s constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites, giving yacht owners even more choices for how they want their systems to perform.

Satellite-communications systems have long leveraged geosynchronous (GEO) satellites that orbit around 26,200 miles above equatorial brine. These systems work fine, but they require a significant amount of power to bridge data across all those miles. The commute physically takes time, which is why satcom providers recently have been launching small low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that orbit at elevations of 340 to 745 miles. They reduce power requirements and latency, and provide more satellites so that if a connection is lost, the equipment just finds the next passing LEO.

OneWeb isn’t the only LEO constellation aloft, but it’s the only one, as of this writing, with a hybrid solution involving GEO and LEO satellites. It also employs third-party antennas and guarantees speed, bandwidth and white-glove service.

Eutelsat OneWeb’s journey to low-Earth orbit began in 2012, when the company was formed with the goal of providing fast, low-cost connectivity to otherwise dark areas. In 2016, the London-based company partnered with Airbus to build satellites, and OneWeb’s first tranche of six LEOs attained orbit in February 2019.

The pandemic then stymied the company’s fundraising efforts. It declared bankruptcy in March 2020, but received support from the British government and Indian telecommunications giant Bharti Enterprises. In September 2023, the Paris-based GEO satcom provider Eutelsat merged with OneWeb. Bharti Enterprises, the British government and SoftBank remained significant stakeholders.

Eutelsat OneWeb’s network became operational in 2023, and it has 634 first-generation LEOs in polar orbit. Of these, 588 are active, and the remaining satellites are spares. Each OneWeb LEO operates in one of 12 synchronized orbital planes at an elevation of 745 miles above the equator.

“We’ve got coverage 35 degrees north, including the North and South Americas, and we recently had our coverage launched in Australia,” says Celeste Endrino-Cowley, Eutelsat OneWeb’s director for maritime and energy. “By the end of Q1 2024, we will also have live countries in Asia-Pacific. The remaining regions of the world will also be connected as soon as we complete the rollout of our ground stations and market access.”

Eutelsat OneWeb will offer a range of speeds. The basic option includes downlink and uplink speeds of 20-by-4 megabits per second, while the intermediate option yields speeds of 100-by-20 Mbps. High-end service delivers connectivity of 200-by-40 Mbps. By comparison, KVH’s GEO-based plans have downlink and uplink speeds ranging from 6-by-2 Mbps to 20-by-3 Mbps.

OneWeb also has maximum information rates (read: maximum data throughput) and committed information rates (read: guaranteed speeds). These prevent a tragedy of the data commons if, say, a cruise ship arrives at your anchorage.

As for latency, Endrino-Cowley says that data takes 70 milliseconds to make the one-way commute to or from a OneWeb LEO. By comparison, data typically spends 500 to 700 milliseconds traveling to or from a GEO.

Eutelsat also owns 35 GEOs, which it has integrated with its LEO fleet. Once Eutelsat OneWeb’s ground stations are complete, this integration will mean global, multiorbit, multifrequency coverage, and will allow Eutelsat OneWeb to move data along the most efficient routes. For example, bandwidth-intensive communications can be sent via GEOs, which offer higher throughput levels, while lower-bandwidth communications can travel via LEOs. This setup also opens the door to enabling higher- and lower-speed channels, such as for owners and crew.

Rather than building its own terminals, Eutelsat OneWeb partnered with terminal manufacturers Kymeta and Intellian, which build flat-panel antennas. Eutelsat OneWeb is also looking at antenna solutions through manufacturers that will be able to communicate with both GEO and LEO services. It also partners with companies such as KVH in the United States that resell antennas and airtime, and provide white-glove customer support.

“KVH One is our umbrella name for our multiple-orbit, multiple-channel network,” says Chris Watson, KVH’s vice president of marketing and communications. “The backbone of that has always been our [GEO] network, and then we brought in 5G, and we brought in Wi-Fi, and now we brought in Starlink, and now we’re bringing in OneWeb.”

KVH’s goal, he says, is for different communication channels to create a unified and stress-free user experience. Various costs will be involved. Starlink’s high-performance flat-panel antenna, for instance, fetches roughly half the expected retail price of Intellian’s yet-to-be-released OneWeb-ready flat panel.

“We’re going to be coming to market with OneWeb terminals and airtime pricing that will be competitive in the LEO space,” Watson says. “It’s going to be: What flavor do you like best? The functionality, the capability and the speeds are going to be very comparable.”

Watson also notes that Amazon and Telesat are building LEO networks: “It’s going to become a very robust ecosystem for LEO services in the next couple of years.”

Overall, the future looks bright for low-cost, high-speed LEO communications, especially when each network can serve as a spoke in the greater KVH One communications ecosystem. Based on what I saw during my visit to Rhode Island, KVH’s network can solve connectivity problems before boaters notice them. For yachtsmen seeking smooth data communications, few gloves are whiter than invisible ones.

Have It All

LEO networks are fast, but each has pros and cons. Modest costs mean that yacht owners can spec OneWeb and Starlink panels. For KVH One customers, a network’s bundled Wi-Fi, cellular and GEO-based satcom become a unified option.

Intellian is building OneWeb-ready parabolic antennas. Some of these antennas will be able to communicate with GEO and LEO satellites, while others will require discrete hardware for hybrid-constellation connectivity.

The post KVH Expands Its Hybrid Network with OneWeb’s LEO Satellites appeared first on Yachting.

If you love nautical yarns, David Grann’s The Wager is a must-read. The nonfiction work details the account of The Wager, a sixth-rate Royal Navy square-rigger that carried 28 guns and 120 sailors. The 123-footer was part of an eight-vessel armada that, in 1741, sailed west around Cape Horn in winter, pursuing plunder. The Wager got separated. In a navigational blunder, the vessel turned north before it banked enough west. It didn’t go well.

Anyone interested in learning about how the great east-west navigation problem was finally solved should read Dava Sobel’s Longitude. Anyone interested in ensuring their own navigational accuracy, however, should cruise with a dedicated Global Navigation Satellite System sensor.

Satellite-based navigation began evolving in the 1960s. The US-built Global Positioning System—the first of its kind—went live in 1993. Today, the international Global Navigation Satellite System consists of four global satellite constellations (including GPS), plus two regional ones. While GPS continues to provide world-class service, GNSS receivers can capture this information along with data from other satellites. The best part? You probably already own several.

Navigational satellites work by broadcasting information about their identification, position, orbit and health status, along with a hyper-accurate time stamp. Receivers derive their position by triangulating with at least three satellites, with stronger (or more numerous) signals often equating to higher accuracy. Precision matters. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, if a clock aboard a GPS satellite is off by one-thousandth of a second, then the corresponding measurement error would be 1,616 nautical miles.

While there are differences between the various constellations, each system employs three distinct segments: control, user and space.

The control segment consists of one or more master land-based control stations and a global network of supporting stations. These stations monitor each satellite’s reported positions and compare reports with predictive models. If needed, operators can alter a satellite’s orbit to ensure baseline accuracy or avoid debris.

The user segment refers to any receivers listening for signals, while the space segment refers to orbiting assets.

Each of the GNSS’ four main navigation constellations contain different numbers of satellites that operate at different elevations and across different orbital planes. The US-built GPS constellation involves 31 satellites that operate at an elevation of 10,900 nautical miles above sea level. GPS satellites orbit on six different planes, and they maintain a 55-degree orbital inclination (relative to the equator).

Russia’s GLONASS constellation, which has been active since 1995, involves 24 satellites that operate at 10,315 nautical miles and orbit on three planes at 64.8 degrees of orbital inclination. China’s BeiDou constellation, which went live in 2011, consists of 35 satellites. Of these, eight are either geosynchronous or inclined geosynchronous satellites that operate at 19,325 nautical miles, while the other 27 operate at 11,625 nautical miles. BeiDou satellites orbit the planet on six planes, and they maintain an orbital inclination of 55.5 degrees.

Finally, the European Union’s Galileo constellation, which became operational in 2018, will (when complete) consist of 30 satellites that operate at 12,540 nautical miles. Galileo satellites orbit across three planes, and they maintain a 56-degree orbital inclination.

GNSS receivers are generally accurate from 6.5 feet to 13 feet globally; however, some countries use a satellite-based augmentation system (SBAS) that improves accuracy by broadcasting correction information. In the United States, this is called the wide-area augmentation system (WAAS). In early 2023, the European Union’s Galileo constellation began delivering free high-accuracy service information that’s precise to roughly 8 inches.

Celestial navigation, this is not.

Satellite-navigation receivers have existed in different forms for years. Depending on the manufacturer and design, these receivers (and their antennas) can be embedded into multifunction displays, or incorporated into abovedecks sensors that share satellite-navigation data with other networked equipment (or both).

Alternatively, yacht owners can sometimes buy an abovedecks listen-only antenna, which shares its improved signal strength and reception with a belowdecks GNSS-enabled multifunction display.

Some satellite-navigation receivers favor GPS signals, while others can also listen to data from some of the other GNSS constellations. Full GNSS receivers can access the four main constellations, plus the regional Japanese and Indian constellations. These receivers sometimes include nine-axis compasses or attitude-heading reference systems. These sensors, which don’t add much cost, provide accurate heading information in addition to GPS and GNSS data.

Finally, satellite compasses are the best option for serious navigation. Depending on their design, these instruments employ multiple GNSS receivers, which provide heading information that isn’t contingent on Earth’s magnetic field (read: high-latitude cruising). Eric Kunz, Furuno’s senior product manager, says the company’s SCX20/21 satellite compasses use four GNSS receivers, allowing them to achieve 1-degree heading accuracy.

While some people say GPS alone is plenty robust for their needs, many marine-electronics manufacturers have been quick to embrace GNSS. “With more satellites available to track and pull into calculations, the GNSS-enabled receivers offer enhanced accuracy,” says Jim McGowan, Raymarine’s Americas marketing manager.

He’s not alone in this assessment. “A GNSS antenna provides more redundancy and higher accuracy than GPS-only receivers,” says Dave Dunn, Garmin’s senior director of marine and RV sales. “Some parts of the world may have better coverage at certain times of day with some constellations than others.”

McGowan says GNSS is especially useful for high-latitude navigators because these receivers can track GLONASS satellites: “Those satellites are in a higher orbit inclination than GPS satellites, which allows the GNSS receiver to get a better tracking angle and duration on those satellites.”

Leigh Armstrong, Simrad’s product manager of digital systems, agrees: “This allows for better maintenance of accuracy in areas with less satellite coverage.”

The inverse, of course, is that BeiDou, Galileo and GPS satellites likely provide better fixes closer to the equator.

While GNSS data is critical for navigation, it can also help bolster the accuracy of other networked devices. Here, Dunn points to automatic identification system (AIS) position and speed data, autopilot performance, and radar target-tracking features.

Looking ahead, autonomous docking systems and vessels need precise position, speed and other navigational information to negotiate harbors, follow autopilot-driven courses, and safely dock. It’s expected that GNSS (with SBAS) will fill this niche.

The Wager’s crew experienced unspeakable horrors, but GNSS receivers and satellite compasses likely mean none of today’s boaters will have to dodge scurvy.

Belts and Suspenders

While the ancient mariner would have paid handsomely for a chronometer, contemporary smartwatches carry GNSS sensors. Most smartphones have GNSS receivers, as do some handheld VHF radios. These are all important backups should a vessel experience low voltage or power loss. 

The post Global Navigation Satellite System Offers Waypoint Accuracy appeared first on Yachting.

John Blackburn’s soon-to-be employers likely had little idea that he was aboard his Jeanneau 44 when they interviewed him for a C-suite position. Blackburn donned a jacket, blurred his background and used his Starlink Roam satellite-communications system to interview with two organizations while cruising Lake Superior’s remote Apostle Islands.

“I was able to connect with 110 percent confidence,” he says, adding that Wi-Fi and cellular communications weren’t dependable at his favorite anchorages. “I couldn’t have done that before.”

True market disruptions are rare. These days, they often involve Elon Musk, who has invested in everything from Tesla and OpenAI to SpaceX. With Starlink, Musk’s ever-growing constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites (LEOs) combines with a supporting network and flat-panel dishes to give boaters faster connection speeds, lower latency and much lower costs than previous VSAT options.

Starlink’s origin story includes the date May 23, 2019, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket released the first tranche of 60 Starlink LEOs. Today, Starlink has more than 4,500 LEOs aloft. The company plans to create a mega-constellation involving upwards of 42,000 LEOs.

Like all satellites, Starlink’s LEOs relay information to and from ground stations. Unlike most other satellites, however, these LEOs carry optical lasers that relay data among themselves, without ground stations.

Distance further differentiates Starlink from legacy VSAT networks, which typically use geostationary (GEO) satellites to ferry data. GEOs orbit 22,236 miles above the brine, which is almost 22,000 miles farther from the closest Starbucks than any LEO. This matters, in terms of latency: Starlink can purportedly send 70 round-trip transmissions in the time required for a single round-trip transmission to a GEO satellite. As of this writing, Starlink is advertising download speeds of 40 to 220 megabits per second and upload speeds of 2 to 25 Mbps, with less than 90 milliseconds of latency.

Unlike radome-enclosed antennas, Starlink uses flat-panel dishes composed of many individual elements. Each dish has an embedded GPS receiver and a gyro, which it uses to track orbiting LEOs. The dish electronically adjusts the power and phase of each element to steer its radio beam at the LEO. Losing satellite contact isn’t a big deal with Starlink, since the constellation’s architecture creates redundancy and resilience.

Starlink offers two plans that boaters have adopted. Starlink Roam costs $600 for a Standard flat-panel antenna, with airtime plans starting at $150 per month. Starlink Maritime costs $2,500 for a Flat High Performance dish, with airtime plans starting at $250 per month.

While Roam’s pricing is enticing, its motorized and self-orienting dish is tripod-mounted and is only designed for stationary use. Also, Starlink’s coverage map limits where users can operate their Roam systems. Bad actors can face penalties.

Starlink Maritime involves a larger, wedge-mounted antenna that’s motorless and designed to be used while underway. Starlink Maritime’s coverage map canvases large swaths of saline, and this coverage only improves with each new tranche of Starlink LEOs. Maritime systems are more expensive, but customers can expect high-performance connectivity almost anywhere.

Boaters say the system works. Blackburn, who landed a job over a Starlink connection, and Randal Briggs, who owns a Cruisers 445 Express that he keeps in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have Roam systems, while Robert McNeill installed a Maritime dish aboard Safari, his 72-foot Viking sport-fish yacht.

“It’s the same service as VSAT but at a better price point,” says McNeill, adding that before Starlink, he fished using an Iridium GO! hotspot. “People didn’t care about satcoms before.”

While Safari often operates 60 nautical miles offshore, McNeill says he hasn’t found any dead spots yet, and he usually can’t tell much difference between his Starlink service and his at-home connection. “When we’re around other boats with Starlink, the speeds slow a little bit, but it has no effect on what we’re doing,” he says. For him, Starlink earns its keep during offshore fishing tournaments, where before, he had to listen through VHF radio chatter to learn the tournament results. “Now, we know where we stand.”

McNeill calls his Maritime service “a fair value proposition,” but he admits there’s always a tipping point. “I hope they won’t change their pricing. It opens the door for a lot of people to have connectivity.”

Unlike with McNeill’s plan, Roam customers need to ensure that their usage areas parallel places where RVs roam. “It’s ideal where we are,” Blackburn says of the Apostle Islands. “I could be in a campground.”

Much of Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay are also covered; however, there are dead spots in New York’s Long Island Sound and the Chesapeake Bay. The Gulf of Maine, the Bay of Fundy in Canada, and the Gulf of Mexico are also problematic. The Great Lakes region is expected to be available before 2024.

Network performance and dependability matter to Briggs, who is an electrical engineer at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, which assessed Starlink from a security perspective for the government. “I sat in on that,” he says, “and then I went out and bought a Starlink that weekend.”

Briggs says that he and his wife aim to complete the Great Loop on their retirement cruise and that they like to remain within sight of land. For them, he says, Roam is a good solution. However, he recently found that Starlink had “upgraded” his service from $135 per month to $150. “That was a little bit aggressive,” he says, adding that prospective customers also need to be comfortable with Starlink’s largely self-help customer support. “I never talked to a human,” he says, explaining that he uses Starlink’s FAQ page and Google searches.

Overall, boaters interested in giving Starlink a try can visit the company’s website (there are no stores). It’s now possible for most boaters to don a jacket, blur the background and land a remote job from a remote anchorage.

The post Starlink Improves Boater Connectivity Anywhere appeared first on Yachting.

Over the course of three years, a 135-foot Dubois aluminum sloop completed a circumnavigation that included a visit to Antarctica and a deep soak in the high latitudes. Interestingly, her most persistent challenge during this time wasn’t plying the high seas, but rather accommodating her increasingly data-hungry guests. The trouble, explains Capt. Mike Lawrence, is that Destination sails with as many as 20 guest-owned wireless devices operating on the yacht’s network, which also has to support the vessel’s navigational and operational data needs.

The solution, Lawrence says, was to upgrade the yacht’s dual KVH V11-IP satellite-communications antennas to KVH’s V11-HTS antennas, which provide significantly faster service, dual channels and—thanks to their operating frequencies—a massive coverage footprint.

Satellite-­communications systems have existed for decades, but the South Pacific, the high latitudes and handsome swaths of the South Atlantic have long been data dead zones. Historically, this has been due to of a lack of demand, as well as the physical size of the antennas needed to utilize the weak signals that exist on these waters.

Fortunately for owners with a taste for speed and off-piste adventures, KVH’s V11-HTS antenna leverages the company’s mini-VSAT Broadband high throughput satellite (HTS) network to deliver dual-channel, high-performance connectivity from virtually all navigable waters.

Abovedeck, the V11-HTS has a stabilized, 1-meter, Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) dish delivering maximum download speeds of 20 megabits per second and maximum upload speeds of three Mbps over its high-speed ­channel, plus a second unlimited-use channel in a range of data speeds. The V11-HTS ($74,995) delivers these speeds primarily by operating on the Ku frequency band (12 to 18 gigahertz) while automatically switching to the C frequency band (4 to 8 GHz) to support coverage in remote areas or during inclement weather.

Belowdecks, the system uses KVH‘s ­latest Integrated CommBox Modem (ICM) black box, housing the modem, network manager, Ethernet switches, storage and Wi-Fi card.

“The V11-HTS is for exploration yachts that sail above Alaska, Asia and the Galapagos Islands, not milk runs,” says Jim George, KVH’s director of global leisure sales, adding that yachts longer than 110 feet are a good match for the technology.

The system’s ability to pipe global, high-speed satellite communications to remote locations is a result of the antenna’s 1-meter dish, four-axis stabilization, and supporting hardware and software, as well as KVH’s mini-VSAT Broadband HTS network. This network is comprised of Intelsat Epic satellites, with additional network capacity coming from SKY Perfect JSAT satellites. Unlike traditional satcom transponders, which typically concentrate moderate amounts of power from single beams across wide swaths, HTS satellite beams have c­onsiderably smaller footprints, onto which the satellite transponder directs significantly more power. In turn, HTS networks allow service providers to focus multiple beams onto data-hungry areas, to deliver additional bandwidth.

All told, KVH’s mini-VSAT Broadband HTS network delivers 25 million additional square miles of coverage compared to the firm’s original coverage map, along with lower per-megabit data costs, and up to five times faster speeds than comparable (and still-­current KVH) equipment. For comparison, KVH’s V11-IP delivers downlink speeds up to 4 Mbps and uplink speeds up to 1 Mbps, while the V11-HTS’ high-speed channel delivers 20-by-3 Mbps speeds (that means 20-Mbps download speed and 3-Mbps upload speed).

The V11-HTS also offers simultaneous dual-channel connectivity courtesy of the system’s 20-by-3 Mbps high-speed channel, and a second unlimited-use data channel that can be configured to deliver 9-by-2 Mbps service. While most owners will reserve the fast channel for A-listers, the second channel is ideal for crew, cloud analytics, data reporting and data-starved grandkids. Moreover, the V11-HTS supports lowest-cost routing and can automatically switch between cellular, satcom and Wi-Fi connectivity, depending on signal availability.

“You could have a crew of eight and six passengers, and no one will see data slowdowns,” George says.

In addition to speed, coverage and an office alibi, KVH also offers powerful network-­management tools to reduce unwanted data burn while bolstering ­cybersecurity. For example, owners can take network-protocol steps to reduce the amount of “invisible” data moving over their networks, such as cloud-syncing ­services and virus and software updates. Rick Driscoll, KVH’s vice president of service development and implementation, says KVH offers optional services enabling network administrators to tourniquet these data bleeds. Users also can access ­KVH-supplied data-use analytics tools, including bar graphs detailing daily and monthly use, and pie charts showing how current data use is being sliced.

As for increased cybersecurity, the V11-HTS’s belowdecks ICM ships with KVH’s “cybersecurity at sea” training program preinstalled. This program represents step one of KVH’s bigger “six-level cybersecurity strategy,” which considers onboard hardware and network ­configurations, and supporting satellite and ­land-based networks, and includes ­access to KVH’s cybersecurity response team.

“­Traffic passes over the satellite in a ­secure, encrypted manner and then through threat-detection devices at the terrestrial network’s edge. The V11-HTS supports all traditional secure protocols [including] HTTPS, [and] as a value-added service, KVH can provide end-to-end ­virtual private-network ­capabilities.”

While the V11-HTS offers faster speeds, lower airtime costs and better ­cybersecurity features than its V11-IP forbearer, the two systems have virtually identical ­hardware, making for an easy upgrade. The antenna delivers ­high-performance connectivity in places where smaller antennas or terminals operating on different frequencies would ­struggle, while offering a serious speed gain.

The post Globally Connected appeared first on Yachting.

The holidays are classically stressful times, but for Michael Oliver, the engineer aboard the Westport 130 The B&B, last year included a three-week owner visit plus three charters. The never-ending flow of guests on board created a constant demand for fast, wireless connectivity.

“Oftentimes, owners and clients don’t understand the nuances of why their video isn’t loading to their device; they simply want it to work, and want it to work now,” Oliver says.

Luckily for him, the yacht’s new KVH V7-HTS satellite-communications terminal delivered almost 20 times faster speeds than the previous antenna.

“All the users on board were able to use their devices just as they would at home,” he says.

Looking for the same outcome aboard your yacht? Here’s some of the biggest news in satellite-communications systems today.

KVH

Bandwidth and speed are two major considerations when selecting a satellite-communications system. KVH has long offered one-stop shopping, supplying the antenna hardware and the airtime. While this approach creates a walled-garden arrangement for customers (think Apple), it also allows KVH to optimize its hardware for its network. For example, in ­October 2017, KVH introduced TracPhone V7-HTS, which provides high-throughput satellite (HTS) capabilities using Intelsat Epic and Sky Perfect JSAT satellites; collectively, these satellites support KVH’s mini VSAT Broadband HTS network.

KVH recently introduced its 14.5-inch TracPhone V3-HTS, delivering downlink speeds as fast as 5 megabits per second and uplink speeds as fast as 2 Mbps. By comparison, KVH’s still-­contemporary TracPhone V3-IP delivers download speeds of 2 Mbps and upload speeds of 128 ­kilobits per second.

“HTS is a departure from traditional Ku- and Ka-band service,” says Rick Driscoll, KVH’s vice president of satellite products and services. “The traditional beams covered large geographic areas. With HTS, the geographic area is much smaller, allowing HTS satellites to deliver higher power to smaller areas. This creates a collection of beams that can focus on geographic areas — say, Miami or New York City — and you can reuse the same frequencies to cover Miami as you use to cover New York City. With traditional beams, you can’t reuse frequencies.”

KVH’s HTS terminals use different modems too, but the real magic is in the satellite network. And while KVH’s mini VSAT Broadband HTS network isn’t global, it covers most popular boating areas.

Read More: KVH’s TracPhone LTE-1 is Super Fast

“We don’t cover the poles or the deep southeast Pacific,” Driscoll says. “The V3-HTS is primarily for people who wander in and out of cellular coverage, for example, boats going to the islands. People typically select a V7-HTS for global travel.”

All told, KVH added 25 million square miles to its global Ku-band (11 to 14 gigahertz) coverage with the advent of its HTS network. And while satcom hardware is never cheap (the TracPhone V3-HTS costs $17,995, while a V7-HTS fetches $29,995), HTS service offers additional good news for owners: “Data costs to the customer are lower,” Driscoll says.

This is especially happy news for data-hungry owners, or their grandkids.

Kymeta

Kymeta snapped heads in late 2017 with its mTennau7 ­Antenna Subsystem Modules, which use metamaterials to transmit and receive satellite-communications signals. These antennas eliminate moving mechanical parts, reduce weight and windage aloft, while supporting data rates exceeding 100 Mbps.

That said, Kymeta’s initial ­offerings were curtailed by the cost of high-speed connectivity, and by Kymeta’s use of iDirect X7 satellite modems, offering a maximum download speed of 65 Mbps. To make the service cost-effective, Kymeta’s KĀLO network delivers 4 Mbps downlink and 1 Mbps uplink speeds, but e3 Systems and Speedcast sell Kymeta hardware that operates on different networks to deliver faster speeds, albeit at higher costs.

Now Kymeta has released its mTenna Plus and mTenna Select. This system, sold as one product (call for pricing), is designed to bolster the performance of installations consisting of two to four mTennau7 antennas. The mTenna Plus combines the receiving connection of the mTennau7 antennas, giving the system 360-degree reception. For example, on a yacht fitted with four mTennau7 antennas, Kymeta says the mTenna Plus delivers “up to 5.4 decibels of effective reception gain and signal-to-noise improvement.”

On the transmitting side, ­mTenna Select determines which panel has the best pathway to a satellite. Transmitted data is routed through the optimal antenna, and the mTenna Select constantly re-evaluates its antenna options to deliver the fastest-possible speeds.

The mTenna Plus and mTenna Select deliver quick speeds while the yacht is underway, but also help owners avoid blockages due to ­buildings, the yacht’s superstructure or other vessels in marinas.

“The mTenna Plus and ­mTenna Select are important for superyachts,” says Bill Marks, Kymeta’s chief strategy officer.

Moving forward, he says, speed will increase and prices will drop as the number of satellites — now roughly 5,000 — increases to 25,000 by 2025. Additionally, Kymeta envisions creating data plans beyond its KĀLO service. Also, Marks says, mTenna panels are now compatible with faster modems.

“We’re focused on building the right technology and building our distribution network at the same time,” he says. “We also continue to invest in developing products, including different form factors. I don’t see the mTennau7 going away — we’ll continue to stand behind it for much more than five years — but we make continued improvements in firmware, hardware and software in a way that’s secure and that offers world-class support features.”

Intellian

Very small aperture terminals (VSAT) are a common way for yachtsmen to transmit and receive data. While numerous service providers and terminal manufacturers are in this space, Intellian has long been one of the more innovative antenna manufacturers.

VSAT terminals typically operate on C- (4 to 8 gigahertz), Ku- and Ka- (26.5 to 40 GHz) frequency bands; C-band serves as more of a legacy frequency, while Ku-band frequencies are the hard-pulling workhorses, and the newer Ka-band frequencies have more bandwidth and frequency slots available. Because of this availability, says Paul Comyns, Intellian’s vice president of global marketing, more geosynchronous and medium-Earth orbit satellites that operate on Ka-band frequencies will soon be entering service.

Intellian’s two newest VSAT antennas, the v65 ($34,000) and v85NX ($41,000), offer open-platform connectivity on Ku-band frequencies. Both antennas also can be converted to operate on newer Ka-band signals.

“Traditional VSAT systems can be improved by bolstering the antenna’s radio-frequency performance,” Comyns says.

As with all connectivity, speed is key, but not all yachtsmen want to pay for the fastest speeds. Inmarsat’s commercial-grade Global Xpress service is one of the fastest VSAT services currently afloat, but it requires a GX antenna (such as Intellian’s GX100HP at $68,000) and a FleetBroadband terminal (such as ­Intellian’s FB250 at $11,000).

For those willing to invest, “it’s a great solution because you always have a FleetBroadband backup,” Comyns says. “We’re increasingly seeing antennas on smaller craft.”

With any satcom system, signals can get blocked as a yacht turns at sea, or by surrounding buildings or other vessels in congested marinas. As a result, yachts are sometimes equipped with multiple antennas and an intermediary control — such as Intellian’s GX Mediator ($9,000) — which allow the system to steer ­communications through the antenna with the best connection.

“It automatically switches as one antenna comes into blockage,” Comyns says. “We’re seeing more and more of [these aboard] yachts.”

The post Stay Connected At Sea With Smart Satellite-Comm Systems appeared first on Yachting.