[SatNews] COM DEV Europe Ltd, a subsidiary of space hardware manufacturer COM DEV International (TSX: CDV), has signed a contract, valued in excess of 3 million Euro, with Thales Alenia Space of France to provide ferrite-based switching payload equipment on CFOSAT, a joint French / Chinese ocean wind and wave monitoring satellite.

COM DEV will supply a Ku-band duplexer and Ku-band switch matrix for the wave-scatterometer spectrometer (SWIM) instrument, which will measure wave activity on the ocean surface. Ferrite switches allow the rapid switching of microwave power with no moving parts for applications where very fast switching at high repetition frequencies is needed. COM DEV Europe Limited has a long and successful history of supplying ferrite switch equipment to Thales Alenia Space and other primes for Earth observation and telecommunications applications.