Helicopter Ku-band SATCOM On-the-Move

There has been substantial development in the past several years to enable broadband, beyond line-of-sight, on-the -move communications to a variety of platforms, in particular ground mobile platforms. Primarily this development has been necessary to support current and envisioned future military operations with widely dispersed forces that depend on high-bandwidth applications. However, rotary-wing aircraft have been left out of this development until recently because of the difficulties in transmission and reception through the moving rotor blades and the extremely limited available space for placing antennas above the rotor blades. In this paper we describe the modifications made to a proven satellite communications on-the-move waveform in order to enable operation of a network of helicopters at Ku-band and present over-the-air emulation results of the performance of that waveform