Satellite Communications

Throughout my career I have been engaged in the field of Satellite Communications in most of my positions.

The earliest was at ITN where in my handled all projects related to RF Communications and my first satellite related project was to install a 3.7m dish to provide a feed for Russian TV from a Gorizont satellite. Given that the ITN studio facility at that time was in the shadow of the BT Tower, there was a lot of C-Band interference to work through. Also, since this dish had to be roof mounted it required some structural steelwork to be installed then a weekend road closure to accommodate a crane for the installation - not your typical TVRO

Subsequent to the 3.7m I installed a 3m Ku Band downlink for CNN adjacent to it. This gave ITN live feeds from both the dominant USSR and US news networks.

My next project was a fly-away SNG Terminal. At the time this was the first such terminal in the UK. The supplier was GEC McMichael and initially their proposal was for a DSNG terminal, but the encoder was not really suitable for fly away use and at the time the number of facilities which could provide a suitable decoder was very limited. After some review and link budget analysis it was determined that we could operate full transponder analog on both the first generation of Eutelsat satellites and also available Intelsat Ku footprints, so that was the solution which was implemented.

As with many of my projects, this was some pioneering work. There was very little experience with even transportable systems, let alone fly-aways so the learning curve was pretty steep - but very successful. There was much collaboration between, ITN, BT and the IBA to bring this to fruition. After a number of deployments in the UK to help shake down the system, one of the earliest true fly-away jobs was to cover the refugee crisis resulting from a famine in Africa. The quality of the live night time shot from the camp at the side of a river was stunning and so superior to the either film or poor quality ENG which normally aired that it even led some to think it was not really live from Africa.

Shortly after relocating from the UK to the USA I was engaged as a consultant with Synergistic Technologies, Inc. in Pittsburgh PA to implement a new fly away SNG terminal. STI provided engineering and logistics support to the EBU News Group and the EBU were seeking an SNG provider who could deploy to cover the Gulf War.

After STI I did freelance consulting work, primarily with Scientific Atlanta. I performed factory system integration testing. Then on-site installation, commissioning, acceptance testing and customer training. The first project I worked on was for multiple 9m Ku Band systems which were being deployed in various Eastern Bloc countries to allow them to access the EBU Network. Since I was very familiar with the EBU this project went very smoothly and I handled final testing for multiple sites.

After consulting for a couple of years, I accepted a full time position with Scientfic Atlanta in their Systems Engineering team. I was responsible for post-sales system integration of multiple projects. The largest by far was a $24M pan-Russia network for voice and data.

I subsequently left Scientific Atlanta and joined TriPoint Global which after a couple of name changes and an acquisition became VertexRSI.

One of my first projects was to take over a large project to buildout TV and FM Radio in Senegal to provide nationwide coverage. This included a C-Band Uplink and Downlinks for distribution and a combination of upgrades at some VHF Transmitter facilities and the construction of five new transmitter sites.

While at VertexRSI a company called Pathfire used our integration facilities to stage a system they were deploying to a broadcast network in the US for file based media delivery. Ultimately I ended up being hired by Pathfire as Principal Engineer.

Pathfire were providing Ads delivery to cable headends via a Hughes VSAT network and also working with NBC News to distribute news clips to their Affiliates, using a Ku-Band uplink for that service being operated by Pathfire. So there was a continuation of my satellite communications here, and a bridge into the world of file based media distribution.

Ultimately the VSAT network economics became unworkable as Internet connectivity was rolled out the these previously isolated headends. Pathfires' news distribution business grew as ABC NewsOne and CNN Newsource became clients. In both cases the implementation was to mux DVB-IP multicast data distribution with their real-time video transport. We deployed hundreds of Data Receivers at TV Stations across the US, connected to Servers which the company deployed and managed.

The media distribution business then expanded into Syndication delivery for CBS and Warner Bros. The same model of muxing store and forward delivery data with real time linear feeds was adopted. This required deployment of additional DVB-IP receivers. Since all these services were managed by Pathfire we had to establish monitoring for multiple C and Ku-Band transponders to ensure Eb/No levels were maintained and also detect uny uncompensated rain fades.

I assumed responsibility for all the Operations side of the business, with a staff of 40.

Along with the acquisition of Pathfire by DG FastChannel the business underwent some changes and transitioned from transport contained within customers own transponders to DG running data distribution via multiple leased transponders with a combination of operated uplinks and service provider uplinks. This network grew to utilizing three full time 36MHz transponder leases

I was responsible for all satellite engineering for Pathfire and Subsequently DG, then Extreme Reach after acquisition. I developed and implemented all the transmission plans, negotiated transponder leases and contracts with service providers. As part of this I developed network capabilities such that we had full site diversity for each of the three full transponder leases. I re-engineered the entire network to migrate to DVB-S2 with 8PSK Modulation yielding singificant additional distribution capacity to support growth of the business.

After I led further re-engineering of the Syndication Distribution business from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, it was possible to transition the delivery from satellite multicast to file based distribution from a cloud based platform via the Internet.