Kratos Awarded Contract to Deliver OneWeb Spectrum Monitoring System for its LEO Satellite Constellation

 April 25, 2022

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc. has been awarded a contract to deliver an advanced spectrum monitoring system for OneWeb to monitor, analyze and review the utilized spectrum to support high quality of service for its fleet of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations.

The system will monitor the spectrum used between its global network of Satellite Network Portal (SNP) gateways and its constellation of LEO satellites. The OneWeb Spectrum Monitoring System (OSMS) will help staff monitor, manage and analyze this spectrum, the radio frequencies that satellite signals travel over.

“With our fleet of LEO satellites that will deliver on our mission to provide space connectivity around the world, it is critical for us to monitor and manage the RF spectrum to ensure that we are delivering on our service performance targets,” stated David Price, Vice President, Access Layer Program at OneWeb. “We are working with Kratos, experts in RF monitoring, measurement and analysis to design, build and integrate the system into our ground operations.”

The OSMS will incorporate Kratos’ industry-leading, integrated spectrum monitoring capabilities to enable real-time management of Radio Frequency (RF) usage and to monitor compliance with frequency transmission regulations. As part of the contract, Kratos is responsible for designing, developing, and installing the OSMS and integrating the system with OneWeb’s ground segment.

At the heart of the OSMS LEO monitoring solution, Kratos will deploy a big data processing, storage and analytics platform for satellite operations. The system will retrieve, store, and access the spectrum traces captured at each antenna during a satellite pass. The RF data across all gateway sites will be consolidated through the OSMS to enable OneWeb’s Network Operations staff to centrally monitor, review,s and analyze the spectrum.

“The OSMS is being built to address the need to monitor very fast-moving LEO satellites and scale to the needs of OneWeb’s fleet of satellites. The Kratos technology used in the OSMS can retrieve, process, and store the high volume of data at almost one gigabit per second on the ground,” explained Bruno Dupas, President of Kratos Communications in France. “Kratos and OneWeb are working together to successfully deploy the OSMS, one of the most advanced spectrum monitoring systems for LEO constellations in the industry.”