GateHouse A/S, Spectrum Signal Processing by Vecima (Spectrum) and Inmarsat will be demo'ing a Software Defined Radio (SDR) implementation of a BGAN terminal at SDR’09 from December 1-4 in Washington DC. The demo will show a Software Defined Radio platform running GateHouse’s BGAN SDR waveform and visitors will be able to access the internet via the Inmarsat BGAN satellite network.

GateHouse initiated earlier this year a program to prototype an SDR implementation of a BGAN terminal. The aim of the program was to demonstrate that a BGAN user terminal can be implemented in software on a commercially available SDR platform. Spectrum’s flexComm™ SDR-4000 software reconfigurable communications platform was chosen for this project. The waveform contains all of the common functionalities required to enable a satellite communication based on-demand beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) communication capability on an SDR. The waveform will enable military users and first responders to achieve connectivity virtually anywhere on the globe (poles excepted), while also supporting terrestrial communication on the same hardware platform. Users could change between line-of-sight (LOS) communications and beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) satellite communication through software reconfiguration. It is also possible to configure radios for specific missions to enable communication between units operating in multinational scenarios with different communication standards.

The BGAN SDR waveform will be compliant with the SCA (Software Communication Architecture) specification version 2.2.2. The compliance with SCA means that the effort to port the waveform from one radio to another is considerably less than for a conventional radio design where the software typically interfaces to custom designed hardware.