Via Satellite: Flat Panel to the Rescue: Antenna Manufacturers Invest in Emerging Technologies to Meet New Demands
“I don’t envy a flat panel antenna manufacturer today,” sums up NSR President and COO Brad Grady. “There’s lots of bumps in the road in order to get to success.” One bright spot in the antenna market, he says, is the government and military vertical. In the antenna market, where commercial use cases, especially consumer ones, are driven primarily by price, government and military customers are making a different cost calculation, Grady says, “Cost has these other dimensions [for these customers]. If I can have an antenna that does multi-orbit, that can reach both commercial constellations and national ones, that means I can reduce my ground infrastructure, it means I can replace the weight or power or space that another antenna would take up with food or fuel or bullets.”