Telesat Corporation’s subsidiary Telesat LEO ULC has announced the successful completion of a collaborative technology demonstration programme with Farcast, a San Francisco-based startup building advanced satellite user terminals.
Telesat LEO ULC and Farcast successfully demonstrated key capabilities of Farcast’s electronically steered antenna (ESA) technology through an extensive development and test programme.
According to Telesat Corporation, the work validates Farcast’s innovative architecture which reduces hardware complexity without compromising performance and significantly lowers size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C).
“The results mark an important step in validating Farcast’s underlying antenna technology,” said Michel Forest, Chief Technology Officer for Telesat. “This work provides a strong foundation for the next phase of user terminal integration and development.”
The programme included Telesat’s LEO 3 test satellite demonstration over the air. Farcast successfully established and maintained end-to-end satellite connectivity through its shared-aperture user terminal, with measured performance closely matching predicted link budgets.
The companies say the results provide strong validation of the underlying terminal technology, paving the way for the next phase of the collaboration: the development of a fully integrated user terminal for the Telesat Lightspeed network, bringing together Farcast’s antenna platform and the Telesat Lightspeed modem solution.
“The progress we’ve made over the past four years is a testament to the incredible teamwork and close collaboration between Telesat and Farcast,” said Siamak Ebadi, founder and CEO of Farcast. “We’re very excited to build on this foundation as we move into modem integration and toward production for Telesat Lightspeed.”
