California-based aeronautical satcoms antenna manufacturer Tecom Industries has appointed Arsen Melconian as its new president. Melconian takes over from Ralph Philips, recently appointed president of Tecom parent company Smiths Interconnect.
Previously Tecom’s engineering VP and chief technology officer, Melconian joined the company, which has interests in both the L-band and Ku-band satcoms worlds, in 2002 as director of engineering. Under his leadership the engineering department more than doubled in size and moved a number of commercial and military programmes from concept to production.
Among the initiatives for which he now has top-level responsibility is Tecom’s collaboration with German Ku-band antenna developer QEST. In September the two companies announced that they would work together to commercialise QEST’s range of innovative designs in an effort to make headway in the airline Ku-band connectivity market.
The deal mirrors a similar arrangement between Starling of Israel and US-based EMS Technologies which paid off recently in a major order from Panasonic for equipment to support its emerging eXconnect service.
Based at Holzgerlingen in southern Germany, QEST first came to the attention of the industry when it unveiled a unique, highly compact dual L/Ku-band design at the WAEA show in Toronto 15 months ago. The solution is designed to exploit the high bandwidth of Ku-band to deliver large volumes of data to the aircraft, while using available L-band capacity such as Inmarsat to send smaller volumes of reply traffic in the opposite direction.
QEST has now teamed with Tecom to bring its ideas to the hotly contested Ku-band market. This already contains players such as AeroSat (supplier to service provider Row 44), ViaSat (supplying ARINC/Rockwell Collins SKYLink/eXchange) and EMS Technologies/Starling.
The QEST/Tecom tie-up covers collaboration at the engineering development level. The German company will provide core RF components such as the antenna aperture and signal-processing modules, with Tecom responsible for overall systems engineering, antenna positioning and control subsystems, product qualification and certification, and after-sales support.
The DoD has changed its structures and is been increasing efforts to facilitate access to loans by companies interested in working with artificial intelligence, advanced materials and semiconductors, biotechnology and quantum science.
India has approved millions of dollars in new military purchases, most of which will go to public sector companies.
The main obstacles to overcoming risks in the region are a lack of a strong cybersecurity culture and inadequate funds to invest in this domain given a widespread Chinese presence in the region.
MBDA is adapting to supply chain pressures as the Russian invasion of Ukraine leads to increased demand for armaments.
Despite the additional funding promised this week, the UK armed forces still look set to face cutbacks, and maintaining international commitments to AUKUS and GCAP may limit the options for other programmes.
This week on the Shephard Defence Podcast, senior naval reporter Harry Lye and military training & simulation reporter Norbert Neumann chat with Professor John Louth.
Connect with us on socials
