An SES Astra ground station. Photo: SES.

ETL Systems has provided essential equipment for ground stations and gateways to support three new SES satellites, the company stated. According to ETL Systems, it installed a large amount of the Radio Frequency (RF) hardware required for the six Ka-band and nine Ku-band gateways and ground stations located around the world. These include four ground stations in Australia, seven in the United States and two in Brazil.

Within the kits ETL provided to SES were custom designed switches and 10MHz splitters designed to meet SES’ specific requirements. The ground stations also feature ETL’s L-band and Super High Frequency (SHF) switches, distribution switches and Enigma switch matrix router systems. According to ETL, Enigma offers complete resilience with single points of failure from hot-swap single input and output cards, dual redundant hot-swap power supplies and CPU modules.

SES announced its plans for the procurement of three new satellites, SES 14, SES 15 and SES 16/GovSat back in 2015. Airbus Space and Defence, Boeing and Orbital ATK, respectively, will manufacture the satellites.