DIFI’s new working group on standards for Electronically Steered Antenna (ESA) interoperability is making much progress, in part because it is much needed and because the 35 member organizations are much engaged, including the U.S. Army.

ESAs are critically important for achieving maximum value for goals such as multi-orbit, multi-mission support, mobility applications and more. Unfortunately, for reasons discussed in an earlier post, the OpenAMIP and OpenBMIP standards that apply today were crafted for a different, far less dynamic era of ground and space technologies.

In a nutshell, the existing monitor and control (M&C) standards were created for a modem controlling a relatively dumb, single purpose parabolic antenna. As a result, more intelligent, multi-purpose phased array antennas are forced to operate as if they were poorly performing parabolics.

The good news is that current standards do their foundational work well, which means DIFI’s working group can focus on augmenting AMIP and BMIP to better mesh M&C with the advanced features and capabilities of ESAs, rather than starting from scratch building an entirely new standard.

For example, the group is exploring topics including handling variations in beam power, support for antennas that can do multi-beam and fast beam switching, and timing synchronization, which is front and center at the moment.

STG iDirect, the original developers of OpenAMIP/BMIP, are fully on board as members of DIFI’s working group. I particularly want to thank Jeremy Turpin, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of ALL.SPACE, for his able and meticulous leadership of the working group.

I encourage any organizations with an interest in ESA antenna operability or the missions that require them, especially government groups who need ESAs to support multi-orbit and multi-mission operations, to join the DIFI ESA Working Group. Visit https://dificonsortium.org/join-now/ for more information on this and other working groups.