Innovative flat-panel antenna company Kymeta Corporation has today announced a ‘landmark agreement’ with Panasonic Avionics Corporation to take Kymeta’s antenna technology to several unique maritime markets. The move comes shortly after the successful completion of an 8,000-mile road test of the metamaterials-based panel antenna in December 2015 with Intelsat, for which an antenna was embedded in the roof of a car.
Under the terms of the agreement, Panasonic will order ‘a significant volume’ of Kymeta’s flat-panel antennae and will use Kymeta mTenna tech to manufacture and distribute maritime terminals for vessels around the world.
“We’re on the fourth generation of the mTenna,” Hakan Olsson – Kymeta’s Vice President of Maritime – tells superyachtnews.com, “as our engineers are constantly coming up with new ways of doing things. The panels are now being manufactured by Sharp in Japan on its TV display line, and all this has led to our discussions with Panasonic Avionics for antennae and terminals. Panasonic believes in this technology, and they’ve seen the progress we’ve made together with Intelsat. This new agreement is a huge milestone for us.”
The Kymeta metamaterials-based mTenna panel uses glass-on-glass TFT construction to create a flat-panel antenna with software-enabled electronic beamforming that can acquire a beam to an angle of 60 degrees from the vertical. It means that the panel could be fixed in place and still be able to acquire and track satellites. “If you’re close to the equator, for example, in the Mediterranean or Caribbean,” Olsson explains, “you could have just one panel facing straight up. If you’re a yacht cruising the world then you’d have multiple terminals tilted to create a 360-degree view, and we’re also looking at a panel that can be mechanically articulated toward a satellite for a better scan angle.”
