[Satellite News 10-12-10] Engineers working for San Diego-based end-to-end satellite solution provider Tachyon Networks were inspired to develop their own military comms-on-the-move (COTM) solution after receiving feedback from customers for a product their company was re-selling. According to Tachyon Vice President of Sales and Marketing Dan Negroni, the challenge began with meeting customer demand. “These customers came to us and asked us for higher data speeds and various other features which didn’t exist in the solution we were re-selling. They asked us if we could just build it for them.”
    Testing of the solution began in April when Tachyon and Intelsat demonstrated Tachyon’s ATR-9300 airborne terminal by streaming full motion video with sustained return data rates. The companies integrated the ATR-9300 terminal with an embedded iDirect Evolution iConnex e850mp series satellite router board, a Rantec Microwave Systems Ku-band mobile satellite antenna subsystem, a General Electric GE9181 inertial reference unit, and space segment from Intelsat General.
    The result was aXiom, Tachyon’s COTM solution that uses iDirect-based ground infrastructure and can integrate with a variety of air, land and maritime satellite hubs around the globe and operate in Ku-, Ka- and X-band. Tachyon is launching its Ku-based airborne COTM, which it hopes will provide higher throughput to high-bandwidth-demand applications such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
    “The aXiom airborne router gets up to speeds of two megabits in flight, which is six times faster than the other solutions out there. There is a technical advantage of getting more throughput, especially for UAVs,” Negroni told Satellite News.
    Each aXiom system has been designed for deployment on specific aircraft types, including C-12s, C-17s and C-130s, and adaptable to most other UAVs and commercial aircraft. To prove the new product ready for sale, aXiom demonstrated real-time full-motion video streaming together with Communications Intelligence (COMINT) and Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) data.
    “Tachyon has moved into the forefront of Airborne Networking solutions with this very impressive performance by its aXiom system,” Karl Fuchs, Vice President of Technology at iDirect Government Technologies (IGT), said in a statement. “We are extremely pleased Tachyon chose to implement our e850mp satellite router board as part of aXiom because it has become the platform of choice in many COTM applications in the air, on land and at sea.”
    Tachyon’s new solution also involves network management across several platforms. Negroni said that Tachyon’s history as a hardware engineering company helped give the company an advantage in developing aXiom’s compatibility. “The benefit of Tachyon is that we run networks. It doesn’t matter what the application is. We design the solution that they need and we implement and manage it. We started off as an engineer of hardware. The legacy of being a hardware engineer has allowed us to be able to incorporate whether it’s a Hughes system or an iDirect system or a ViaSat system. We build software that enables the customer to use any one of those systems with our system so we can manage their network for them.”
    Negroni said aXiom’s versatility could manage systems on new networks, such as the U.S. Army’s next-generation Blue Force Tracking (BFT-2) system. “We haven’t been engaged with ViaSat on BFT-2, but airborne tracking is something we can do.”
    Tachyon deployed proprietary software glue as a part of aXiom to improve network performance at high speeds, which often is limited by dropped connections while tracking satellites. The product also features a graphical interface that aims to make it easy for any military warfighter on ground to use. However, the aXiom’s most important feature, according to Negroni, is the product’s ability to help the military better manage its assets. “As the military uses more video surveillance through UAVs, aXiom will help them get a much higher quality full-motion video feed and provide the communications intelligence, data and signals the command centers need to make better decisions on the ground and protect their assets and troops.”