A satellite orbits a digitally connected Earth, with glowing lines and circular data points illustrating a global data-sharing network, against a backdrop of stars.

Multi-orbit antennas were in the spotlight at the recent SATELLITE 2024 show. I heard much talk about them in meetings, on the floor and in panels.

There’s no lack of reasons for the attention. It’s being generated by trends such as mission requirements from government customers, product announcements from companies, including Kymeta and ALL.SPACE, and, maybe most of all, the explosive success of Starlink with subsequent business reactions from other satellite operators.

Suitable antennas are the essential element of any multi-orbit solution. But, as the logicians say, they are “necessary, but not sufficient.”

One thing missing is interoperability for those antennas. Last month, DIFI announced the formation of a working group to develop a state-of-the-tech industry standard for the ESA antennas needed for multi-orbit operations. Without such a standard, you might be able to support multi-orbit, but not multi-satellite, multi-operator or multi-mission, which will be needed for many, if not most, multi-orbit strategies implemented at scale.

That requirement raises another. Today’s antenna standards are based upon a legacy scenario in which a single-purpose antenna is controlled by a single modem. Those modems are the next issue. Most current approaches to multi-orbit terminals are still hardware-based, leading to a bad kind of multi: cobbling many proprietary boxes into a “Franken-modem” terminal needed to access each network in each orbit. As we have already seen in most proposed multi-orbit solutions today, that’s going to be big, heavy, inefficient, power-hungry and expensive.

The only realistic way multi-orbit works, especially at scale, is with a digital ground network architecture anchored by software modems and other virtualized components. That’s especially true when you consider that an increasing number of multi-orbit antennas are starting to generate a native digital signal. Let’s be generous here: at minimum, it’s sub-optimal to convert that back into analog just to transport it to a hardware modem. This is one reason why so many of the traditional satcom infrastructure companies are racing to bring out software versions of their legacy platforms.

Modems aren’t the only software apps that could be added to a modern uCPE-type terminal to enhance multi-orbit operations at the near or far edge of the network: virtual FEPs, security functions, signal monitoring and much more could be resident and orchestrated to match multi-orbit mission and service needs. But they only work at scale when they can interoperate.

If you are interested in participating in the DIFI ESA Working Group or any other DIFI effort, please visit https://dificonsortium.org/join-now/ for more information on this and other working groups.