Interview with Vince Waterson, President, Asia Pacific Teleport
Vince Waterson, President of Asia Pacific Teleport has worked for over 30 years telecommunications industry in Asia, Europe and North America. Vince founded VideoKall Inc while maintaining his role as VP of Business Development at Hawaii Pacific Teleport (HPT) a provider of satellite Internet services to the Asia Pacific region. Prior to joining HPT, Vince was VP of Business Development at Subic Bay Satellite Systems Inc, (SBSSI) satellite teleport in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Philippines. There he initiated the first large scale satellite internet service in the Asia-Pacific region in 1997 launched on Asiasat2 satellite. While at SBSSI he designed and operated a satellite delivered Electronic Program Guide (EPG) system for cable TV head-ends in the Asia-Pacific region operating on Thaicom3
In 1988 he designed FAXCAST the world’s first commercial group3 facsimile broadcast system delivered over satellite, terrestrial television and cable television networks. We caught with Vince recently on his newest venture Polverter which is planning to launch a new product at Satellite 2012. The following are excerpts of the interview:
Tell us about your new venture?
Polverter Inc. is a startup company that will launch at the Satellite 2012 show a new product called “Polverter” that will enable circular polarized VSAT antennas to operate efficiently with linear polarized satellite transponders. This product was developed by Dr Donald Chang who earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University and later became a chief technologist in the satellite engineering serving a major aerospace company for more than 20 years. He is the CEO of Spatial Digital Systems (SDS). Other members of the Polverter team include Dave Sturgess who started his career with IBM in Europe and is now Chief Design Engineer at a UK R&D company C21 Systems. The company has recently completed a contract to design a high speed signal processing system which is now installed on British submarines.
How are you able to make circular polarized VSAT antennas to communicate with linear polarized satellite transponders?
We are able to do it from just one location at a linear polarized VSAT hub or teleport with no adjustments required at the circular polarity remote VSAT terminals in the network. Traditionally a teleport which needed to work with a legacy network of circular feed VSAT antennas moving from a circular polarized satellite to a linear satellite would need to have all the end users change their feeds from circular to linear. The cost of purchasing replacement feeds, shipping them to the end users and hiring competent satellite equipment installers to change the feeds is not only a very costly operation but it is also very time consuming.
Polverter changes all that. In a matter of minutes a Polverter transceiver can be installed in the transmit and receive RF chains at L-band of 70Mhz/140Mhz IF and immediately the remote sites are able to transmit circular polarized signals to a linear polarized satellite without any loss of performance. The remote VSAT terminals will amazingly be able to receive the linear polarized signals and decide them without any signal loss.
So how can this be possible? Surely the signal transmitted from a circular polarized VSAT terminal will illuminate both the vertical and horizontal transponders on the linear polarity satellite?
Yes it does. We are not defying the laws of physics. But that means that one carrier is now occupying double the bandwidth needed if it is working with a circular polarized satellite. Well one carrier would but the Polverter system has an interesting trick up its sleeve. The system requires two carriers to be uplinked from each VSAT terminal. Both carriers from the circular VSAT terminal appear in the vertical transponder and the horizontal transponder of the satellite. When those two signals reach the Polverter at the teleport the two signals on each polarity transponder can be reconstituted back with one signal on each polarity by the time signal reaches the modems at the teleport.
On the reverse path the teleport uplinks two signals on each of the horizontal and linear polarities however at the receiving VSAT terminal each signal will appear on a different circular polarity (ie RHCP and LHCP).
At the teleport there is also installed a receive only circular polarity antenna which receives the same signal as is received at the remote VSAT terminals. This signal is also fedto the Polverter. The Polverter samples the signals from both the local feedback circular antenna and the signals received from the VSAT terminals on the linear transmit/receive antenna at the teleport. It does this sampling 50,000 times per second using custom high speed analysis circuitry programmed with WaveFront Multiplexing technology. (US patent pending and U.S. patented by SDS1,2.)Wavefront Multiplexing is one of those technologies which after it’s been explained to the average satellite engineer he will probably need to sit down in a dark room for a couple of hours to let his brain cool down.
What about the cost, something that does all that might be very expensive?
You’ll be surprised how cost-effective this product is, check us out at the Satellite 2012 show in Washington D.C. to get more details.
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NOTES
1U.S. Pub. App. No. 2012026937; “Accessing LP Transponders with CP Terminals via Wavefront Multiplexing Techniques,” filed 06/29/2011 by Spatial Digital Systems.
2U S Patent No.: 8,111,646; “Communication System for Dynamically Combining Power from a plurality of Propagation channels in order to Improve Power Levels of Transmitted Signals without Affecting Receiver and Propagation Segments,” issued on 02/07/2012 to Spatial Digital Systems.
