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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to In-Orbit, the podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world, brought to you by the Satellite Applications Catapult. I'm your host, Dallas Campbell. Thank you very much for your company. In this series, we are going to be in conversation with some of the most inspiring minds in the country, exploring all the ways that the UK is using space to make huge differences to our everyday lives, as well as gaining a better understanding of its role in shaping and sustaining our planet for the future. Now then in today's episode, we will be exploring the critical role of satellite antenna testing and its importance to the space industry.
I'm joined in the studio by Evangelos Mellios, he's the Antenna and Radio Frequency Engineer from the Satellite Applications Catapult, Harvinder Nagi, Senior Systems Architect, also from the Catapult. We've got Miro Blicharz, who's the Operations Director at Helix Geospace, and joining us remotely from Glasgow is Martyn Lees, the Senior Antenna Engineer from Spire.
Now, antennas are the unsung heroes of space missions, enabling vital communications and data transmission between spacecraft and ground stations. However, ensuring their reliability and performance in the harsh conditions of space is no easy feat, and that's where satellite antenna testing comes into play, where rigorous evaluation and experimentation are conducted to guarantee their functionality, durability, and efficiency.
Hey, thanks for coming in to talk about the unsung hero that is antenna, ant, antenna? Antennai? How do I, I don't even know how to pronounce it. That's how out of my depth I am today. Where do we even start with that? Maybe the pronunciation would help. Antenna or Antennai?
[00:02:09] Miro Blicharz: No, it is antenna. Antennai is the plural, yeah, antennai is the plural, but it's for the insects. When they have...
[00:02:16] Dallas Campbell: That's what my brain was going, I was immediately thinking of kind of like weird proboscis on it. Anyway, who wants to start? So Antenna testing, okay, maybe we should start about I mentioned unsung heroes, why a space satellite antenna unsung heroes. Let's start with... who's looking most nervous. Harvinder is looking quite, looking at me blankly. You can start cause you're from the catapult.
[00:02:42] Harvinder Nagi: Yeah, I'm from Catapult. Hello, guys. So why is it important?
[00:02:47] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, or maybe even what are they? Like when I'm imagining kind of things on, you know, sticky out things on satellites.
[00:02:54] Harvinder Nagi: So just a brief description. I guess it's probably fair to explain them briefly.
[00:02:59] Dallas Campbell: Exactly. Yes.
[00:03:01] Harvinder Nagi: So they form the, you know, two functions. One is the transmit function and the other one is the receive function. So it receives the radio waves, you know, from the transmitter and the transmitters function is to send the signal, what we are trying to do, which could be a video or audio.
[00:03:18] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:03:19] Harvinder Nagi: So prime examples is your own mobile phone. It's got both transmit and receive because your mobile phone enables you to talk and receive data. So, previous antennas, if you remember the old phones, it will have a...
[00:03:33] Dallas Campbell: That's what I was thinking of old TVs with the old rabbit ears. Proper antenna, old school. I'm guessing you don't have aerials on your satellites that you sort of pull up and they sort of...
[00:03:44] Evangelos Mellios: Pretty much!
[00:03:44] Dallas Campbell: Oh, you do.
[00:03:45] Miro Blicharz: Pretty much, yeah.
[00:03:47] Dallas Campbell: That's good. Yeah, Evangelos, yeah, if we were to, well, actually on my phone, you can't even see it, cause I guess it's built within the case now, isn't it?
[00:03:55] Evangelos Mellios: So, yeah, that's the beautiful thing with antennas. So there are lots of different types of antennas. You can, lots of people must have seen the big parabolic DCs that can go up on a big satellite, or you use them on the ground to receive signals from satellites.
On the other hand, you may have tiny antennas, so your phone must have eight antennas or so that are very, very small. So each antenna is made for a specific purpose, with a specific performance in mind.
[00:04:23] Dallas Campbell: So we know what antenna are. So they're for sending and receiving signals. Okay.
[00:04:29] Evangelos Mellios: Yeah.
[00:04:29] Harvinder Nagi: And they're very frequency dependent. They're designed as when Evangelos said that they are made for certain frequency bands.
[00:04:36] Dallas Campbell: I suppose that's the important thing, and when I said unsung here, they're pretty fundamental to pretty everything that we do, obviously in space, no point in, there's no point in sending something up if you can't talk to
[00:04:46] Evangelos Mellios: Exactly, so in order to do anything clever with the signal, afterwards you need to be able to transmit and receive it in the first place. So that's why the importance is fundamental for any communication system. Even more for antennas on satellites, because you cannot go up there and change it...
[00:05:03] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:05:03] Evangelos Mellios: ...it if it doesn't work properly.
[00:05:04] Dallas Campbell: Always, it's generally quite tricky as historically we found fixing things in orbit is a bit of a challenge. I suppose I want to know kind of how, when we think about spacecraft engineering, is it particularly difficult, the sort of antenna, is it particularly challenging thing to do to sort of get them right and, you know, in the scheme of things?
[00:05:24] Harvinder Nagi: Yes, it does. I mean, I have worked in aerospace industrial and there's a lot of testing goes into it to make sure it goes through different vibration, different environmental specifications, radiation specification, because there's a lot of, you know, hostile radiations in space before they are launched and so the answer to your question is a lot of aggressive testing goes at the ground level before they're launched in space.
[00:05:50] Dallas Campbell: I like that, aggressive testing, so what do we mean? Things like vibrating tables...?
[00:05:54] Harvinder Nagi: Yeah. So vibrating, as a, with a launch of the rocket, because the G forces multiply and then it's not just normal gravity, it'd be 20 times the, potentially up to 20 G forces could be experienced by the payload system, the wireless systems. So yeah, you have to replicate all that in a lab environment.
[00:06:14] Dallas Campbell: So maybe just maybe, yeah, tell us what kind of facilities that you have here in the UK for testing this. What does the satellite applications catapult have?
[00:06:23] Evangelos Mellios: We do have a number of facilities. So antenna testi is, is important. You need to be able to test the performance on the antenna to make sure that they perform as well as you want them to perform. The testing needs to be reliable, needs to be repeatable in under controlled conditions. So at the Catapult we have a number of different labs to, that are, designed in order to support antenna testing, each designed for a different type of antenna. One example is we have a lab called the Nearfield Range. So this is a...
[00:07:00] Dallas Campbell: What's it called? So the near...
[00:07:02] Evangelos Mellios: Nearfield Range.
[00:07:03] Dallas Campbell: The Nearfield range. Okay. I suppose. Okay.
[00:07:07] Evangelos Mellios: This is built inside the room that is, an anechoic chamber. Anechoic means...
[00:07:12] Dallas Campbell: I'm slightly obsessed by that because they look, so this is, it's a kinda sound or at the absence of sound.
[00:07:18] Evangelos Mellios: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:07:18] Dallas Campbell: Your kinda spiky, foamy thing.
[00:07:20] Evangelos Mellios: Yes, exactly. So very similar to a recording studio. You want a quiet environment, but from an electromagnetic perspective. So you have a room covered with absorbers, so that absorb energy in radio frequencies, so that you don't have any unwanted reflections of...
[00:07:36] Dallas Campbell: It's not, so it's not so much sound that you are trying to...
[00:07:39] Evangelos Mellios: No. You, you... So it is like sound, but at different frequencies, so...
[00:07:44] Dallas Campbell: So, okay.
[00:07:45] Evangelos Mellios: Higher frequencies, which is the electromagnetic...
[00:07:49] Harvinder Nagi: It's the radio waves, I think.
[00:07:51] Dallas Campbell: Radio. Yeah, that's a, okay.
[00:07:53] Harvinder Nagi: So it's the radio waves trying to prevent, so they prevent that any kind of interference from any communication, which could be a mobile, could be your, you know, police signals or any kind...
of
[00:08:04] Dallas Campbell: So basically you stick i the anechoic chamber, and then you can, so you're totally free of magnetic interference?
[00:08:11] Evangelos Mellios: Yes. If any external interference...
[00:08:13] Dallas Campbell: So you can really sort of understand what's going on, how it's...
[00:08:16] Miro Blicharz: Yeah.
[00:08:16] Evangelos Mellios: Test that one variable and you need to test the performance of the antenna to make sure it works as well as it does, and also you need to make sure that your antenna will not generate any interference to other applications, for example.
[00:08:30] Dallas Campbell: Okay, so we've got an anechoic chamber. I once recorded, I once filmed in an anechoic chamber in Manchester. We... it's really, I don't know if you can go inside your anechoic chamber...
[00:08:39] Evangelos Mellios: We have, yes.
[00:08:39] Dallas Campbell: you? It's the weirdest thing because it's completely devoid of any sound and you can kind of hear your heartbeat and it's really disconcerting. Anyway.
[00:08:49] Evangelos Mellios: Another facility...
[00:08:50] Dallas Campbell: Office parties, I'm imagining everyone, quick, let's go to the anechoic chamber, nobody will hear us!
[00:08:55] Evangelos Mellios: Yes, or it's a very nice environment for an afternoon nap.
[00:08:58] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Have a little sleep.
[00:09:01] Harvinder Nagi: A christmas party.
[00:09:03] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:03] Evangelos Mellios: Another facility that we have at the Catapult that is quite unique, probably the only one remaining in the UK, is an outdoor facility to test antennas. So in order to create this quiet environment from an electromagnetic point of view, we go to open space. We have a 400 meters open field where we have a transmit antenna on one side and an antenna to test on the other side. We use this large open space to test the antennas. So instead of absorbing the energy there, there's nothing around it to create any interference.
[00:09:36] Dallas Campbell: Okay. So basically you're kind of recreating the environments that the equipment would be facing in space, everything from launch through to...
[00:09:45] Harvinder Nagi: That's right. So there are certain standards they follow to like military standard or DEFSTAN or Ofcom and ITU gives you a certain way how to measure these testing.
[00:09:58] Dallas Campbell: I suppose I want to know why it's so crucial. I mean, what's the environment in space like? Like why is it crucial to sort of test it to such a... I mean do things go wrong in space historically that you've got to spend time making sure...
[00:10:11] Harvinder Nagi: There has been lessons learned from things gone wrong.
[00:10:14] Miro Blicharz: I think beyond the mechanical problems of vibration and shakes and others, there's also obviously the link budget. So in order for your antenna to work in space, you need to have enough gain and you need to be filtering the right frequencies. So you're not interfering with any other satellites around you.
So what you don't want to find out is once you're up there in space, you're trying to make a link to the satellite and actually find out that your antenna hasn't got enough gain to make a connection.
[00:10:40] Dallas Campbell: I'm going to ask a really dumb question. What do we mean by gain? I mean, I understand because on my microphone, it says gain. I never know quite what means.
[00:10:47] Miro Blicharz: So the way we measure gain in antennas is we have whats called an isotropic gain so how much power you are able to transmit in all directions so we are then able to say, if we modified the pattern of that antenna, so just like a microphone works really well in this direction, but works really rubbish in every other direction. We can do the same with antennas. So then we can measure how much power we are receiving or slash transmitting in a specific direction, and that basically gives you the gain and you need to have enough gain to be able to receive the right amount of signal to be able to then decode it and actually get some communication messages from that.
[00:11:27] Dallas Campbell: Got it. Okay. Maybe someone could tell us a little bit about how antennas actually work. Take it from the sort of beginning of a kind of 101 lesson into radio frequency antennas and how it works kind of in space.
[00:11:41] Miro Blicharz: So I can give it a go. I think, I mean, I feel like I'm getting...
[00:11:44] Dallas Campbell: Jump in for...
[00:11:45] Harvinder Nagi: Can I add point to Miro's point about why do you have testing in space? I mean, one of the major issues is the cost. So you spend a lot of time and effort developing those technologies and if it goes in space and it fails, that money's not coming back, and that's a company's big investment gone into it. So that's my little point, adding on to the previous point. So now going back to the, uh...
[00:12:09] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, just take us sort of through the kind of life cycle of how it all works, like how, how a sort of satellite communicates with the earth or another satellite.
[00:12:18] Miro Blicharz: Right. Do you, should I have a go?
[00:12:20] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, Miro you're you're looking keen.
[00:12:21] Miro Blicharz: I'm nervous now. I've got...
[00:12:23] Dallas Campbell: We will judge you!
[00:12:24] Miro Blicharz: I've got PhD students. So, you know, but no, so an antenna is ultimately a piece of equipment. It can be pretty much anything really can be an antenna, but it's something that normally it's piece of metal. Yeah. It doesn't have to be necessarily metal, right? But it's something that will release or resonate in energy at a certain frequency. So just like a tuning fork, for example, when you smack it, it will resonate at a very specific frequency. What that does is it creates an effect on the antenna perspective, electromagnetic field, which then generates electric and magnetic fields. So it disturbs the area around it.
As that happens, that propagates further and further, and then if you have another antenna of similar make somewhere else, that antenna will then take that propagation and, disturbance in the electromagnetic field and it will receive it and it will basically take that energy and then pass it down to whatever you want it to pass it down to.
[00:13:27] Dallas Campbell: Brilliant.
[00:13:29] Harvinder Nagi: Just adding to your point, Miro, it's very frequency dependent. Not every single frequency will be translated by every single antenna either. So, you have to make very, very niche and custom to specific requirement.
[00:13:42] Evangelos Mellios: Yeah, and one more comment to add this related to what Miro said earlier about the radiation pattern of the antenna. The antennas are designed, depending on the application, to transmit or receive the energy to specific directions. Some antennas need to be more omnidirectional, like the antenna of inside your mobile phone. You don't know how you will be holding it, so you need to be able to communicate equally to all directions. Other antennas, a satellite for example, you want to illuminate a specific area on Earth, so you need to make it...
[00:14:10] Dallas Campbell: So everything is kind of mission dependent. You design your antenna depending on what it, what your satellite wants to do and where it is, presumably.
[00:14:17] Evangelos Mellios: Yes, it's not only the satellite, it's also the other side of the link, on the Earth. So you might have a lot of different types of antennas on the Earth. You might have a fixed ground station with, pointing at a specific satellite, you might have terminals or moving vehicles or aeroplanes for broadband connectivity or communications. You might have antennas for GPS, for example, that are small antennas that need to be fit inside small handheld devices.
[00:14:44] Dallas Campbell: So is it that the catapults provides all this kind of equipment for, and then companies can come to you and go, right, or I've got an idea that I want to try and build something, build a prototype or actually build an actual thing that can...
[00:14:55] Harvinder Nagi: Yeah, we are like a neutral entity and we provide facilities...
[00:14:59] Dallas Campbell: A neutral entity, I like that.
[00:15:00] Harvinder Nagi: Yeah, like that word.
that.
[00:15:03] Dallas Campbell: Sounds quite...
[00:15:03] Harvinder Nagi: So we are unbiased. We are here to energise the space sector, okay, as a neutral entity, we welcome SMEs or even larger enterprise come and do the testing, and then, talking about the satcom, we, satcom always have very directional antennas.
So you have a satellite in space, which could be fixed at one point in geos, geo orbit, or it could be a layer orbit, which could be constantly moving and they're always facing at one point, on the earth segment, okay, and then it's not the, they don't have very omni-directional antennas, in space.
Following on from the facilities, we are also working on another facility called CSAT in Westcott, not very far from here, measuring the dynamically moving satellite antennas in a lab environment. It's a big, massive anecoic chamber, 14 by 8 by 8 meters and trying to create, moving satellites within that chamber.
[00:16:03] Dallas Campbell: So you'll have something moving in the chamber, hence the size of
[00:16:07] Harvinder Nagi: We'll, simulate the movement effects within the chamber.
[00:16:11] Dallas Campbell: Let's bring in Martyn up there in Glasgow. So Spire, just tell us kind of where Spire actually, well, and Miro as well, Spire and Helix, maybe just tell us a little bit about just, well, first of all, introduce Spire to our listeners. I'm sure lots of listeners will have heard of Spire, but just tell us what you're doing up there and how this is useful for you.
[00:16:31] Martyn Lees: Yeah, sure. So Spire Global are a data analytics company, essentially, and we use space as our vantage point to go and collect data that's useful for people on Earth. So that can be things like weather prediction modeling. We can collect data from GPS signals which reflect through the Earth. We can collect this, process it, and, you know, try and predict where natural disasters may occur.
We also do things like vessel ship tracking, so maritime, we do aviation tracking, we can find out where our planes are, which give out ADSB signals, and what's quite interesting about Spire is that we do this from a very, very small satellite, which is around the size of a loaf of bread. It's a typical way of explaining it, and this has an array of sensors on there so we can do all of these different applications with one small platform, which sort of goes against their traditional space companies, which, as we've discussed, could spend 20, 25 years on one specific mission. It can cost, you know, hundreds of millions, up to billions of pounds, and then it may go up there and not work. So, Spire can launch a constellation of small multi purpose satellites and get data much quicker and we can improve much quicker. Every design is an iteration for Spire and we can essentially, you know, improve 10 times the next generation of satellites.
In a nutshell, that's what Spire is. We're based in Glasgow, and we have our own manufacturing and design facility there. It's the largest office and we primarily use the Catapult for antenna testing. It's one of the only facilities that we don't have on site at the moment. We have vibration tables, thermovacume chambers such as that.
But what we don't have is the antenna test and that's where it's critical and where Catapult have really supported us over the last two years. Having a UK based facility that lets us test all these array of antennas from very, very low frequency, vHF, all the way up to sort of K band, that's where Spire operate, which is, again, quite different to companies who have one specific frequency, one application. We need our to be quite dynamic and Catapult really do offer that.
[00:18:44] Dallas Campbell: So they've been helping you out, with, with your antenna testing. What about Helix? Tell us, Miro tell us a little bit about Helix.
[00:18:50] Miro Blicharz: Sure. So Helix is a bit smaller, so maybe not a lot of least since I've heard of it. But so Helix Geospace is based in Harwell, very close to the Catapult building. We design and manufacture dielectrically loaded helical antennas. So that's quite a mouthful.
[00:19:07] Dallas Campbell: Back up.
[00:19:07] Miro Blicharz: That's right. So...
[00:19:10] Dallas Campbell: yeah.
[00:19:11] Miro Blicharz: That is one type of an antenna... dielectrically loaded helical antenna.
[00:19:16] Dallas Campbell: I want one of those. did, what is one of those?
[00:19:20] Miro Blicharz: The idea is that, helical antennas have been around for quite a while. So helical antennas, as you may imagine, it's literally a helices which rotate and they combine together. That gives you a very nice pattern and omni-directional directional pattern, in direction and a fairly high gain and fairly easy to make.
The problem of those, they are quite big naturally because of the frequencies that they are used in. If they are loaded just by air, they will be quite big. So what Helix does, and it's based on Oliver Leaston's previous work for, and the founder of the company, we use a ceramic, which is dielectrically loaded.
So it's filled with a dielectric material. That increases the dielectric constant of the material itself. What that then means in turn is that we're able to minimise the size of the antenna whilst maintaining high efficiency.
[00:20:14] Dallas Campbell: Actually, well, that's an interesting point. So minimising the size, like everything, everything seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So Spire, it's a loaf of bread. In the old days, satellites were kind of massive, the size of cars, and now they don't. So, the miniaturisation of antennae is important, I'm guessing.
[00:20:30] Miro Blicharz: Absolutely, so this is where being able to load it with a specific material helps it a lot, and the way in physics it works is the speed of light is traveling at three to the eighth. But as it hits a, high dielectric constant, it will slow down. Speed is related to the frequency. Therefore, if you can slow down the speed, you can technically change the frequency, which means you can operate at a certain frequency at much lower, smaller size.
So that's in principle what we do. So Helix, uses this technology for geopositioning, so for GNSS antennas, but we also design for communication, for satellite communication, for example, Iridium. So, we found, we're finding that our antenna works really well in embedded systems where you need a small antenna.
However, as we mentioned before, the actual connection to the satellites, it's nothing like your 4G here because you have so many base stations on earth, you can have a really poor antenna with quite poor efficiency, and you'll still be able to make the link, whereas
[00:21:35] Dallas Campbell: I'm amazed how I still can't get 5G wherever they're always they always kind of over promise the phone coming always Oh, yeah, you get 5g anywhere.
[00:21:43] Harvinder Nagi: And we're already talking about 6G already, you know.
[00:21:45] Miro Blicharz: That's right.
[00:21:46] Dallas Campbell: Remember when they brought out 5G and they were like, oh, it's gonna be brilliant, and you'd be able to do all this amazing stuff?
[00:21:50] Evangelos Mellios: Yes.
[00:21:51] Miro Blicharz: Yeah.
[00:21:51] Dallas Campbell: And lo and behold you can't.
[00:21:53] Harvinder Nagi: Still waiting for the amazing stuff.
[00:21:54] Dallas Campbell: I know so anyway, so okay, so anyway, so it's not like 5G.
[00:21:58] Miro Blicharz: Yeah, no, it's, so the antenna is a lot more efficient, and, that allows you to make that connection to the satellite link, still in a relatively small unit.
[00:22:08] Dallas Campbell: Got it. So, Martin and Miro, let's say, just take us on a little journey. So we've got, we've built our prototype, or our model, that we want to send into space. We truck down to Harwell, to the Catapult. What's, just take us through the process of how one tests an antenna?
[00:22:27] Miro Blicharz: Sure. If I can go first, Martyn, I mean, from, from our perspective, Vangelis is our savior because really, you know, we, the great thing about the Catapults, they...
[00:22:38] Dallas Campbell: Are they nice to work with?
[00:22:40] Miro Blicharz: They are brilliant to work with.
[00:22:41] Dallas Campbell: Do they have like good coffee?
[00:22:42] Miro Blicharz: They have a very good coffee, actually, I definitely recommend. I think what really comes down to is we can definitely trust the results that they come back with, which helps our research and development a lot because we are able to test and develop much quicker, and then if we are providing information to our customers, we definitely know what we're providing, it's true, and the customers will be satisfied with the information. But in terms of the process, we are very close to the building. So, you know, we tend to just stroll over to, to Vangelis, you know, we tend to book, slightly in advance for a day or two, the near field chamber. But, they are again, very, nice and they've tried to get us availability as much as possible.
[00:23:27] Dallas Campbell: Hey, five stars, you get this.
[00:23:31] Harvinder Nagi: Ten out of ten!
[00:23:31] Miro Blicharz: Right. Why'd you think I was invited?
[00:23:34] Dallas Campbell: Exactly. I could have a look at your comment section.
[00:23:37] Evangelos Mellios: Actually it's one of success story working of the Catapult, working with a small company because we've got a lot at the early stages of the company when the funding is limited, obviously, so they cannot build their own facility. These are quite expensive, but now they have reached a point that they have grown quite a lot, and now they have, they are in the process of building their own testing chamber and they can, move out.
[00:24:03] Dallas Campbell: Well, actually it's a really good point. How, important is kind of babysitting companies that come to you and sort of looking after them and supporting, because I mean, obviously it's a pretty niche area this.
[00:24:12] Harvinder Nagi: Well, I have come from a very commercial world before I joined, Satellite Application Catapult, and the two acronyms are very common, you probably know that. It's a DFM and TTM, right? It's designed for manufacturer and time to market, and then I think one... What we try to do is, you know, as mentioned previously, neutral entity, you know, we try to help smaller companies or any companies basically who want to launch their products as soon as possible in the market, and we find them a platform and, you know, good people and good, educated professionals to accommodate them, as and when required.
[00:24:50] Dallas Campbell: Martyn, up there in Glasgow, what's, for you, what are the kind of challenges that you've come across in terms of antenna testing? Is it, I mean, when you design an antenna and then you test it in these environments that we've been talking about, the anechoic chamber and the vibration table and the environment chamber that sort of simulates launch and space, does it always go right or is, do things go wrong that then need improving?
[00:25:13] Martyn Lees: Things usually go wrong that need fixed before the launch.
[00:25:16] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. I'm just wondering, it's like, do you get? Yeah, do you get it, not get it right first time. It's...
[00:25:21] Martyn Lees: Spire's are quite a special case in some instances where we pretty much have to get our launch right first time. The launch date's set, the contract will come in, there'll be a mission, and we have to meet it. Antennas are quite specialised to design, that's where my expertise is, and obviously we then use Evangelos expertise for testing.
But for us to get it right first time, we must essentially test with the satellite. So for example, you asked about, you know, what's our timeline like for testing? We would have a mock up satellite, ship that down to Catapult, and we would have a fully deployed satellite, essentially within the anechoic chamber with our antenna on it and one of the big issues is that the antenna can be impacted heavily by that sadly. So the solar panels are large metal panels which deploy, you could have other areas that can basically ruin the antenna pattern. So if you're buying commercial off the shelf antennas and assuming you have this perfect performance. That doesn't always happen, and what we've learned is that we must design, simulate, and then eventually measure in the intended sort of position.
[00:26:29] Dallas Campbell: That's interesting, and you only find that out during the testing process. Is that, this is the point where you go, oh crikey, that's not going to work because there's a blooming great solar panel in the way.
[00:26:40] Martyn Lees: Yeah, and what can happen, like we mentioned earlier, certain frequencies can resonate with certain lengths of metal, so if you have some energy which couples into somewhere where it shouldn't, that can resonate and, you know, put an interference signal elsewhere, which is unintended for your satellite and others, so yeah, Spire to deliver on our customers that we test in with a platform in mind.
[00:27:03] Dallas Campbell: Evangelos tell us about some of the kind of success stories. You know, we've got a couple of examples of companies who've been using your equipment, but how long have you been going and what kind of successes have you had? Can you kind of look at some examples of satellites that are up there and working beautifully and go, yeah, we did that antenna, that's one of us.
[00:27:21] Evangelos Mellios: Yes, yes, certainly. So we definitely have supported quite a few companies, with the design and the build of antennas like Martyn said, that have, already gone, up onto, onto space. On the other hand, we have all supported a lot, a few companies during the development phase, and that's, I think it's, quite important.
So it might take years to develop, an antenna for specific application, and during that process, you need to be able to test, the product, and that's something that we have offered to quite a few companies. We have supported them at the early stages during the development phase of their product, and now they, they have launched products. They have got hundreds of millions of pounds of, investors money, now five or six chambers of their own and doing their own tests.
[00:28:13] Dallas Campbell: How busy are you?
[00:28:15] Harvinder Nagi: Oh, yeah. Reasonably busy.
[00:28:16] Dallas Campbell: I'm kind of interested in just from your point of view, is it like, well, 10 years ago, we weren't that busy, and now it's like, we've got...
[00:28:25] Evangelos Mellios: We are busy. We were working with quite a, quite a few companies. So, they keep us busy, but one of the important advantages of the Catapult, I think is the flexibility and the accessibility to, to the labs. There are lots of other labs out there in universities, for example, there are other facilities in the UK, but the primary focus of these facilities is not supporting small companies, this is a side focus. So being able to have quick, flexible, and easy access to facilities such as ours is quite important. So we are busy, but on the other hand we try to be flexible and fair and supportive to all of these companies that we are working with.
[00:29:05] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, for someone like me, you know, there's nothing about antenna, I'm interested in what the kind of big antenna news is, like what is the future of antenna? If we kind of look forward, is there or are they kind of perfect now? We've done antenna now, don't need to worry about those anymore. They're all, it's all great.
[00:29:24] Miro Blicharz: No, absolutely not. I think there's always going to be, I mean, the problem of antennas and correct me if I'm wrong, but, the research side is so much faster than the kind of commercial side on the antenna. So that if you look on the, on the research in academia, there's a lot of amazing, you know, antennas made of metal materials and they can change shape and they can change pattern based on loads of things and that's all very interesting, but actually when it comes to kind of manufacturing in time to do a manufacturing, that's a completely different story, and then also people are used to making the antennas for very cheap. So, when you have a, obviously not for satellites necessarily, but for kind of normal usage, the antenna is expected to be, you know, less than a dollar and whether it's in a car, whether it's in the phone and that really just comes down to the huge volumes that you need to manufacture with and that is quite boring. You tend to go for the old school methods to do that because you don't want to risk doing anything different.
[00:30:19] Dallas Campbell: Are you kind of pushing the boundaries of...
[00:30:21] Miro Blicharz: I'd say we're...
[00:30:22] Dallas Campbell: ...pushing the envelope of antenna design.
[00:30:24] Miro Blicharz: Yeah. We're right in the middle of the, I'd say, I think, what we're, Helix is trying to aim to at the moment we, we do the smaller volume and. and higher price, but actually our manufacturing process, which we're working very hard on is scalable. So you can go from, you know, 50, 000 a year to 2 million a year in a fairly reasonable time.
[00:30:44] Dallas Campbell: And it's kind of research into this area and design, is it about getting it better or is it about simply getting it more affordable, cheaper, scalable, like what's the, what are the kind of priorities?
[00:30:56] Miro Blicharz: I think, yeah, it depends for satellite communication. I think better is always, you know, the money isn't necessarily that big of a problem because you don't want to lose the satellite and you don't you want to make sure that it works properly. Where it's less safety critical, actually, that, you know, the price becomes more of a factor.
Autonomous vehicles is an interesting one because it's kind of in the middle of that. So it's not a satellite, it's not a kind of a very expensive space, but it has to be safety critical, and in order to be able to safety critical, the antennas that are going...
[00:31:27] Dallas Campbell: wait, are you talking about autonomous vehicles on earth?
[00:31:30] Miro Blicharz: Of the future, yes.
[00:31:31] Dallas Campbell: As in, so they're going to have to be sort of talking to the satellite, so...
[00:31:35] Miro Blicharz: Well, they'll have to be talking to each other, they'll have to be getting GPS data, GNSS data. But for example, if they drive out of a LTE 4G network, they still need to be, you know, they still need to be talking to some something and that will most likely be through a satellite.
[00:31:50] Dallas Campbell: Never even thought of that. I mean, I had thought about that, but I'd never thought about the fact that actually a lot of that's going to come down to how good the communications between the various...
[00:31:59] Evangelos Mellios: Antennas are fundamental for this.
[00:32:01] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:32:02] Harvinder Nagi: Well, at Catapult, we are also working on connected vehicle, you know, in high speed internet broadband as well. So that's one of the projects in the, which I'm running at the moment for connected vehicles.
[00:32:14] Dallas Campbell: Oh, okay. So high speed, high speed internet, but using
[00:32:18] Harvinder Nagi: LEO satellites
[00:32:19] Dallas Campbell: LEO as in, I mean, people will have heard of Starlink. Is that the sort of...
[00:32:22] Harvinder Nagi: Yeah. So there are three different major constellations, OneWeb, Starlinks, and Kuiper from Amazon. So, last data we were working is about 4. 5k LEO satellites in space up to 2022 data, and they're projecting that up to about 60k satellites in space in LEO orbit by 2030. So, we are catering for the next generation of facilities as well.
[00:32:45] Dallas Campbell: Crikey, and so I suppose my question is then what are the challenges? You've got this whole new kind of great world opening up in Low Earth Orbit of these, these satellite constellations of which getting the information to and fro. So in terms of you as, in terms of testing, shall we say, you've got all these new ideas that Miro was saying, new designs, new, strange, new exotic materials. How do you keep pace in terms of the testing of those?
[00:33:10] Harvinder Nagi: I'm working on a project, a facility in Westcott, which is mostly, so the next generation of, antennas are mostly electronically stable. So it will be basically something like this. It'll have little patches printed on the antenna itself, like...
[00:33:25] Dallas Campbell: Like a flat, you're looking at your iPad.
[00:33:26] Harvinder Nagi: Like a flat panel antenna, and you can literally stir the beam without changing the mechanical position of this, flat. So you ...
[00:33:35] Dallas Campbell: How do you do that?
[00:33:36] Harvinder Nagi: Oh, there's some...
[00:33:39] Dallas Campbell: Cleverness, clever people make it.
[00:33:41] Evangelos Mellios: And Martyn have to design this kind of...
[00:33:43] Harvinder Nagi: You can steer it, but, you know, plus and minus 60 degrees, depending how you design it, and we are making a facility which will take into account the beam steering side of things and the motions of a vehicle, as Miro mentioned, autonomous connected vehicles, I call it CAVE. So we're trying to simulate those effects in a lab environment, in a big anechoic chamber, so that we start testing these with moving LEO satellites in space. So that's next generation. We are working on a facility, which is probably not two to three years program.
[00:34:14] Dallas Campbell: Martyn for Spire, what does the future look like for you guys up in Scotland? Are you part of this this new world?
[00:34:22] Martyn Lees: Yeah, so electronically steered, antennas or arrays or something that we've been exploring within, you know, say the last 12 months, whether that when that turns into a product or a use case. So, as I said, as the satellites flying over the earth, if you have quite high data, so it could be a very imaging payload, which is a lot of data and memory that needs to be downlinked to Earth.
You could need a phased array which can steer and track the ground station as you're going over it, in order to maximise the time that you can transfer the data. So, when it comes to needing something like that for a specific mission, then 100% that's what we need to develop and test. But for Spire, we're getting quite much larger in satellites now.
So, loaf of bread is changing into, I don't know, a microwave size, and that allows us to pack more technology, which then goes up in frequency. We have some sort of hyperspectral monitoring type devices, which are high frequency microwave, which again would be, you know... way beyond the testing capabilities of what's currently on offer and we'd have to look at ways to do that.
[00:35:21] Dallas Campbell: Here's a question for you, Martyn. As a antenna engineer, what gives you the biggest headaches? Like, what are the biggest, I'm trying to get an idea of what's the biggest problem for you, for you guys, as from an engineering point of view.
[00:35:33] Martyn Lees: So, personally, it's space constraints. So, satellite volume is critical.
[00:35:37] Dallas Campbell: Space constraints, space, it's just not big enough.
[00:35:40] Martyn Lees: Yeah.
[00:35:41] Evangelos Mellios: Yeah.
[00:35:41] Martyn Lees: Volume constraints on the satellite is a better way of putting that. So, our satellites must fit in a deployer of a certain size, which may mean we have sort of the 10mm on the outside faces of the satellite.
[00:35:53] Dallas Campbell: Can I just say, but you mean the kind of the size of the rocket essentially? Like...
[00:35:58] Martyn Lees: So, on the rocket they usually have what's called the deployer. So the deployer has it within it, multi satellites, which then get ejected as the rocket, once it reaches orbit, essentially, yeah. So it's catapulted out, and then, within that box, though, there's a certain size and regulation which we have to adhere to and that space is very limiting for antennas. So antennas get the, usually improve with, you know, size, weight, thickness, and all of those are fighting against us personally for CubeSat antenna designs, so we have to find the kind of ingenious ways, so for example, deploying antennas, so antennas that we want to be four times the size that we have to unfold it a bit like origami in order to maximize the area, and that lets us then have a higher gain, more directional antenna. So yeah, so for CubeSats, that is one of the most difficult, things to try and design.
[00:36:51] Dallas Campbell: I always think though, I think that when you have constraints in engineering or art, whatever it is, that is the driver of creativity. When you've got limitations, if you've got just a blank canvas, do whatever you want, nothing happens. But if you've got, okay, it's got to fit inside this box, it's got to fit here, it's got to do that.
Is it, as engineers, is it a creative endeavor what you're doing?
[00:37:13] Miro Blicharz: Yeah, I completely agree with Martyn. I think 99% of the problems is to do with will it fit? And then, you know, because like Martyn said, it's always easy to make a bigger antenna, which is better and with higher.
[00:37:26] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:37:27] Harvinder Nagi: But if it did fit, then would it work?
[00:37:29] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:37:31] Miro Blicharz: But yeah, I'd say it's a very creative process. I mean, in Helix, we're continuously innovating and trying to come up with different ways and obviously how to make it cheaper, but also how to, how to make it more reproducible, and, I mean, it's quite exciting. I mean, when obviously there's areas of kind of slugging away and nothing works, but then you sometimes sit onto the one thing that really changes the game and then from there on, you almost think, well, why, why did we race the last 12 months doing it this way? So, I think that's just a natural process in, you know, if you're challenged and you're keen enough you will find a solution for it.
[00:38:05] Dallas Campbell: I love that, and is it, does the sat well, hopefully the Catapult encourages that, that sense of creativity and supporting that.
[00:38:12] Evangelos Mellios: That's one of the main objects of the Catapult to support the and encourage this creativity and, help the industry move ahead.
[00:38:24] Harvinder Nagi: Yeah. We normally provide the tests facilities, for instance, we also get people together and form a consortium to do a out of the box, you know, blue sky research type of project with different, academia or, industrial partners, getting some UK space agency or, you know, European space agency funding.
[00:38:47] Dallas Campbell: I will never look at antenna in the same way again. Gents, thank you so much for coming in and talking to us and sharing this. I think I know everything there is to know about antenna and antenna testing. I think. May all your tests be successful. Actually, may, that's not true. May all your tests be, well, enlightening. Thank you.
[00:39:05] Miro Blicharz: Yeah. Thank you very much.
[00:39:06] Harvinder Nagi: Thank you very much.
[00:39:08] Dallas Campbell: Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for your company. To hear future episodes of In-Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app. And to find out more about how space is empowering industries between episodes, you can visit the Catapult website or join them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.