Mobile/personal terminals for COMETS advanced mobile satellite communication experiment

The Communications Research Laboratory is now developing mobile and personal earth station terminals for an experimental advanced mobile satellite communication system using COMETS, which is scheduled for launch in 1997. The terminals under development are a briefcase-sized handy terminal for low bit-rate voice and a mobile terminal for voice and data. The system used the extremely high frequencies of the Ka-band (31/21 GHz) and the Q-band (47/44 GHz) and one-hop communication links between the terminals. Because of this, the terminal antennas, and countermeasures to rain fall attenuation will play key roles in the system hardware. An on-board regenerative transponder, the world's first SCPC/TDM type, will also be a key component of the system.