STI SNG Operations

After initially being a consultant to the company, I established and ran the SNG Operations Team at Synergistic Technologies, Inc. in Pittsburgh, PA.

The EBU News Division contracted STI to provide SNG Services, we had a 12 Hour response time SLA and more than once we had unplanned deployments when the day ended up on a flight to Europe or elsewhere.

Initially we had just one system which was integrated by Midwest Communications. It utilized a 1.8m antenna by Vertex Communications which was designed to be truly portable. The antenna reflector was multi-segment making shipping much simpler. The associated electronics package comprised a pair of phase combined TWT Amplifiers and an Exciter(combined Modulator and Upconverter) from Scientific Atlanta.

Subsequently a second identical 1.8m system was procured and then a 2.4m antenna was added which could be used with either system.

These systems were deployed in multiple locations - largely in former Soviet Union as many countries were seceding from the USSR at that time.

Many times the countries we were deployed to had little accessible satcoms infrastructure. One such occasion shown below was a deployment to Albania to cover elections. There were only three uplinks in the country, one was ours, the second was another flyaway unit from the German PTT also on the hotel roof, and the other was the Albanian PTT's only gateway Earth Station.

Below is a deployment on the roof of the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow, which was on the corner of Red Square, behind St Basils Cathedral and overlooking the Kremlin.

Marketing literature from that time for SNG terminals used to show a guy in a suit at airline desk with a couple of boxes to check-in, how far from reality that was. We ended up with at least the following:

- 5 x Antenna Cases
- 2 x Waveguide Cases
- 2 x HPA PSU Cases
- 2 x HPA Module Cases
- 1 x HPA Frame + Combiner Case
- 1 x Exciter + Receiver Case
- 1 x Video/Audio Monitoring Case
- 2 x Misc Cable Cases
- 3 x Portable Generators
- 1 x Inmarsat Terminal

For the first fly away deployment, we showed up at the Pittsburgh Airport BA Check-in and caused absolute chaos with all that excess baggage. After that we had an agreement with the BA Station Manager and US Customs that we would take the gear to the Cargo terminal. Customs would review and stamp the Carnet docs, then BA would load everything into a couple of ULD's which ensured it all stayed together during shipment and made handling a lot faster.

Operation for many of the locations we were deployed to in Eastern Europe and former USSR were via Intelsat IOR Ku Band spotbeams. At the time there was minimal traffic on these spotbeams and on a few occasions I worked in cooperation with EBU and Intelsat to have the spotbeam footprint pointing adjustment to ensure we could operate.

Most of the time we were using a cross-strapped transponder where our Ku Band uplink was being received on a C-Band downlink by a large antenna at a PTT Earth Station somewhere in Europe.

The lack of Ku Band traffic on these satellites made satellite acquistion a little challenging and typically relied on the use of a Spectrum Analyzer to find a beacon signal or other reference carrier. I developed a set of procedures for operators around this technique, using computed Az/El Angles and the use of at least two other satellites to cross-reference against.