Aircraft interiors EXPO: QEST for the perfect Ku-band antenna?

Posted by admin on April 1, 2008

The ferment of activity in the Ku-band antenna arena continues, with the announcement that German supplier QEST is working on a lightweight bidirectional system designed to support broadband satellite communications for passenger aircraft.

Based at Holzgerlingen in southern Germany, QEST first came to the attention of the industry when it unveiled a unique, highly compact dual L/Ku-band design at the WAEA show in Toronto last September. Such a solution exploits the high bandwidth of Ku-band to deliver large volumes of data to the aircraft, while using available L-band capacity such as Inmarsat to send smaller volumes of reply traffic in the opposite direction.

Now the company is offering an all-Ku system offering megabit data rates both to and from the aircraft. “Hybrid solutions impose a burden on the satellite operators, requiring them to develop new ways of processing Ku and L-band signals simultaneously,” says QEST sales director Michael Stobinski. “We want to off

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