Austria’s Scotty Group is promoting new airborne communication equipment that will offer high-definition (HD) video streaming, audio and data exchange over lower-bandwidth, less-expensive satellite networks. The company has carved a niche as a low-cost provider of connectivity solutions for airborne surveillance and claims to have sold its equipment for use on 150 platforms that are flying today. These include light twins such as the Diamond DA42 MPP and Tecnam MMI/MRI through medium twin-engine King Airs and Dash 8s to helicopters, including CH-47s and CH-53s.
“Anyone can provide equipment that transmits HD video over Ka- and Ku-band networks,” noted Manfred Scheiring, Scotty’s global sales and marketing director. “But our future Scotty Communication Platform [SCP] will be able to use L-band satellites for streaming at as low as 192 Kbps rate. It’s a trade-off between resolution and frame rate that users can juggle,” he explained.
Scheiring was speaking at the recent Global MDA and Coastal Surveillance conference in Singapore, organized by IQPC. He presented jointly with Airborne Technologies, another Austrian company that offers adaptations of aircraft for low-cost surveillance solutions.
Scotty’s hardware allows advanced communications over compact transmission equipment and can connect to all types of sensor turrets and cabin cameras. Its future SCP is based on a hardware coder-decoder (codec) PCI board designated HD580 and a compact processor. This combination enables duplex video communication, one-way video streaming, video recording and PC-based applications through satellite-based IP networks. It also permits UAV and sensor control and video teleconferencing from (for instance) VIP aircraft. If users select high resolution and a low frame rate, they can enjoy sharp but less fluid live video that is still ideal for surveillance. If they select the reverse, the more fluid but lower-resolution video is ideal for teleconferencing, according to Scotty.
L-band satcom systems include Inmarsat, Iridium and Thuraya. Scheiring noted that Scotty’s equipment is also compatible with 3G and 4G communications systems, but the bandwidth can vary greatly on these shared networks.
Scotty was founded in 1993, and also provides satcom systems for land and maritime platforms.
