After 17 years of being the go-to Australian company for bespoke radio and microwave engineering systems, EM Solutions may have found the product that will add volume manufacturing to the portfolio.

Philip Smart | Adelaide

Customers such as BAE Systems, Airbus Defence and Space, the ADF and American communications giants L3 and TCS have all incorporated the Brisbane based company’s expertise and subsystems into their own products and projects.

EM Solutions equipment is part of Spanish company Indra’s military OTM X-band communications terminal, the Thales-supplied satcom system on Norway’s Nansen naval frigate, the Yahsat military satellite terminal provided by Astrium EADS UK and Australia’s own JP2008 Advanced Satellite and Terrestrial Infrastructure System (ASTIS) and Parakeet satellite radios.

In Japan, EM Solutions’ Satcom On The Move (SOTM) systems are at the technical heart of a new government project to enable rapid broadband communication from moving vehicles, vessels and even offshore floating buoys through its own Wideband InterNetworking engineering test and Demonstration Satellite (WINDS) in response to emergencies and natural disasters.

But like business development specialists everywhere, EM Solutions global director of sales Gary Shmith has a vision for the company, including a transition from bespoke low-volume design house to mainstream player with a wide-appeal product and a volume production line.

“EM Solutions has always been extremely bespoke,” Shmith told ADM. “If you want a problem solved in microwave communications or mechatronics, you come to EM Solutions. There’s always a technical challenge to solve, but the technical challenges we’ve solved haven’t necessarily translated into large scale deployment, so you’re effectively getting an hourly rate for your engineering as opposed to having the engineers develop something that you can sell for the next five to 10 years that generates recurring revenue. One of the things we’re trying to do now is to start to make that transition and not just continue to broaden the IP portfolio.”

EM Solutions Satcom On The Move (SOTM) systems are part of the Japanese Government’s WINDS disaster recovery program. Credit: EM Solutions

That’s quite a departure for a company that has made its name using pure engineering to solve complex technical problems as part of larger projects on behalf of other people. But the combination of market forces, experience and innovation, together with EM Solutions’ dual backgrounds in both communications systems and the mechatronic systems needed to help them acquire and track satellites may have just come together to create the technology that will make it happen.

The world’s increasingly insatiable appetite for communicating from moving vessels and vehicles – Satcom On The Move (SOTM), is something EM Solutions has been helping to feed on behalf of customers for the past five years. Proliferation of modern communications satellites, advances in modem technology and the continuous development of smaller and lighter ground terminals have created the ability to phone, Skype, email, message and transfer data from any vehicle equipped with the SOTM receiver/transmitter and its distinctive “beehive” radome, even at highway speeds.

“Our breakthrough is that we can now cost effectively do multi-band on-the-move terminals.”

But the application has its issues. SOTM has been likened to keeping a garden hose aimed at a particular high-rise office window from the top of a moving vehicle, while catching a stream from the same window at the same time. Overhanging trees and buildings can break the receiver’s lock on the satellite stream, leading to breaks in transmission while the system reacquires. And the laws of physics mean particular antennae are tuned for specific bands of communication. Communication with two satellites of different bands has meant two systems, with the attendant doubling of required physical space, power supply, control systems and maintenance regimes. Until now. EM Solutions has taught its terminals to talk to multiple satellites.

“Our breakthrough is that we can now cost effectively do multi-band on-the-move terminals,” Shmith said. “If our systems are out in a theatre somewhere or out on the open sea, if they’re not under the coverage of one satellite this terminal can immediately switch over to a different satellite and provide continuous communication. That will effectively give our customers with one terminal the same sort of roaming that we expect with a mobile phone.

“People have done that before, but they’re selling terminals to the US DoD for a million plus dollars. We’re talking terminals in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’re smaller and lighter, less complex.”

The technology solves numerous problems, from the proliferation of hardware on vessel decks and vehicle tops to ensuring continuous transmission from a single system even in areas where satellite coverage may be patchy. The EM Solutions terminal also borrows a tracking concept from radar systems that helps maintain tracking accuracy within 0.2 degrees for better performance. And the price breakthrough puts the EM Solutions system within the grasp of militaries for individual vehicles, but also for high-end law enforcement and disaster relief agencies. The new system has created more than a ripple of interest around the world, suggesting the multi-band terminal could be the mainstream solution needed to help EM Solutions add volume manufacturing to its portfolio.

“We’re doing some very good things with our Japanese partners, but it’s so bespoke it’s hard to take that story and create something out of it,” Shmith said. “Whereas what we’re doing now has got the attention of Inmarsat, the Australian Navy, Border Protection, plus Selex and the Italian Navy.”

And like the majority of “overnight” success stories, the terminal is the result of long years of development and testing. EM Solutions was awarded a Department of Defence Capability Technology Demonstrator (CTD) contract in 2009, and successfully tested the resulting on-the-move terminal on a Bushmaster protected mobility vehicle the following year. The company was then awarded a follow on ADF contract for Wideband Global Satellite (WGS) terminals (see page 28 for more on WGS) before beginning delivery to the Japanese WINDS project in 2013 and is now working through another CTD for the multi-band on-the-move system.

But like many companies that would like to see Australian products on Australian defence vehicles, EM Solutions is frustrated by the lack of a direct link between CTD and ADF procurement. Shmith believes that although CTD is a great program, the first volume order for the on-the-move terminals may go offshore, and that the system may only find its way on to an Australian defence vehicle through an international prime contractor.

“This terminal has emerged out of two CTD programs, one of which is currently still in place,” he said. “There’s a whole bunch of new ships coming through with the Australian Navy. We’re doing a CTD for these terminals that has been specified as being sponsored by the Australian Navy. But then to actually sell that into the Defence department you’ve got to leapfrog that and come in through a multi-national supplier or people like that who have their own FMS solutions to push.”

Whichever way the orders arrive (and announcements were pending at press time), Shmith knows that success with the multi-band terminal is going to need a concentration of focus within the company. The world is about to change.

“We’ve got a pipeline of opportunities in that terminal space that is significantly larger than we could hope to cope with at this point in time without making major changes to our organisation,” he said. “It’s a nice position to be in but it’s also challenging because it’s saying we’ll move from that bespoke operation to that commercial production, which obviously brings challenges in resources to make it happen.”