11th Ka and Broadband Communications Conference

As we start the second decade of our conference, there are signs of a steady upturn in the commercial satellite industry due to some new starts and to replacements for the aging satellites launched in the nineties.
In Ka Band we have seen some progress with the launch of Anik F2, to be used by Wild Blue for its direct to customer broadband service, SES Americom's AMC 15, Echostar 9, and the expected launches next year of IpStar, Wild Blue 1, and the military Wideband Gapfiller.

These positive signs, however, are moderated by the announcement that Spaceway, the last of the global Ka Band systems, will be used for HDTV broadcasts.

The deployment of the above systems and significant improvements in coding and high level integration are bringing us closer to the realization of consumer market ground terminals that will help realize the full potential of this frequency band.

Several new applications geared to mobility are creating new markets for which satellites are uniquely qualified, and presage a new era of broadband services to aircraft, as evidenced by the transatlantic broadband internet services offered by Connexion by Boeing on Lufthansa and the live television by Directv on Jet Blue Airlines in the US.

The advent of the Galileo project should provide the impetus for a new look at satellite-aided navigation and related communications to improve the management of aircraft in flight, to reduce congestion and to increase the efficiency of travel by using the most direct route.

Refinements in propagation modeling, real time weather information for fade mitigation, and efforts on architectures and protocols offer novel approaches to better utilize the available spectrum and maximize satellite throughput.

In view of the above developments, the Ka and Broadband Conference is soliciting papers that highlight broadband and mobile communications, satellite-aided navigation, and the traditional applications in Ka Band for the following sessions:

· Navigation
· Mobile Broadband Services
· New and Updated Ka Band Flight Systems
· Ka Band Ground Systems
· Advances in Ka Band Components
· Experimental Ka Band Results
· Satellite Architectures
· Communications Protocols
· Ka Band Propagation and Fade Mitigation
· Marketing
· Regulatory Issues

The Conference will also host the Third BroadSky Workshop organized by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology of Japan.

This year, the conference will be held jointly with the 23rd AIAA International Communications Satellite Systems Conference - ICSSC 2005.