[White paper] Controlling Unmanned Aircraft Through Regular Commercial FSS Transponders. Good Or Bad Idea?

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Unmanned, or more precisely - remotely piloted, aircraft are seeing an increasing interest and foreseen applications include cargo planes, crop dusters, surveillance planes, etc. Like any other airplane, the flight of such planes needs to be controlled in a safe and reliable manner. When flying within the reach of a control transmitter/receiver on the ground, control of the unmanned aircraft may be conducted through this station. However, there will be large areas where building a ground-based control network is not technically possible, e.g. over the oceans, or economically practical, e.g. for long-haul flights or flights over areas with low traffic density. For such cases, satellite links would be a logical choice.

As groundwork to the upcoming ITU World Radiocommunication Conference 2023 (WRC-23), this whitepaper by AsiaSat explores UAS CNPC (“Unmanned Aircraft System for Control and Non-Payload Communications”) operations, which will be addressed under Agenda Item 1.8 of the conference. The paper also explores UAS CNPC' impact on current FSS (Fixed-Satellite Services).

This paper was originally published by AsiaSat.

15 August 2022 / AsiaSat White Papers / By Ray Sharma