SPACE TO GROW
MANAGING SATELLITE OPERATIONS
A Soldier of the 53rd Signal Battalion works on the operations floor in the newly dedicated Wideband Satellite Operations facility in Wahiawa, HI. (U.S. Army photo by D.J. Montoya, 1st Space Brigade Public Affairs.)
Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines stationed around the world who work daily to defend our great Nation,” he said.
SATELLITE CAPABILITIES Each WGS satellite has a throughput of approximately 4.75 gigahertz of band- width, equating to 2.1 to 2.5 gigabits per second of communications. That’s about 10 times the bandwidth capacity of a Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) satellite, enough capac- ity to transmit approximately 3 million web pages per second, 400 Predator video feeds per second, or 0.5 high-resolution CT (computed tomography) medical scans per second.
“A single WGS satellite equals the band- width capacity of the entire 10-satellite DSCS constellation,” said Dan Hannan, USASMDC/ARSTRAT Senior Technical
40 Army AL&T Magazine
Manager. “We’ll be able to support many, many more warfighter missions with WGS compared to DSCS.”
SSG Michael Clifton agreed. Clifton is a 25S SATCOM Systems Operator/Main- tainer with Delta Company, 53rd Signal Battalion, 1st Space Brigade, which staffs and operates the WSOC 24-7. With the combination of WGS satellites and the new wideband control systems, “If war- fighters call up with issues, our operators can pull things up and respond a lot faster,” he said.
COL Jeffrey Mockensturm, Project Manager Defense Communications and Army Transmissions Systems (DCATS) in Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS), said that controlling WGS satellites, com- pared with legacy DSCS satellites, is “a
geometric leap in terms of complexity of the mission for these satellite controllers.” For one thing, DSCS satellites transmit in only X-band, while WGS satellites trans- mit in both X-band and Ka-band, but the difference is more than that, Mocken- sturm said.
“The WGS satellite is so much more com- plex,” he said. “WGS is not just a bigger pipe, but more pipes and the ability to switch between pipes on the bird, coming up on one frequency and going down on another. In the case of Ka band, we have dual simultaneous polarity, making two channels from one.”
“Thanks to WGS, ground forces who are using an X-band terminal or radio have the capability to communicate with other forces who are using a Ka-band termi- nal or radio,” said Michael McGarvey,
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