As we prepare for our annual pilgrimage to The Things Conference in Amsterdam, Lacuna Space team reflects on six years of in-orbit operations and the rapid progress in state-of-the-art satellite IoT technology.
The Things Conference (TTC) is the leading event for innovators in the IoT space, bringing together everyone from corporates, to start-ups, to individual innovators and academics. For Lacuna Space, TTC is our mecca, with Lacuna’s Netherlands office only a short journey from the venue, this event provides a fantastic opportunity to bring the whole company together from our various remote offices around Europe.
Looking back at keynotes and interviews, TTC has documented our rapid progress across six years of in-orbit development and operations. Seven years if we count the early proof of concept phase where transceivers were placed on high altitude weather balloons to verify the ultimate range achievable using LoRa modulation.
In those early days the LoRa community would proudly post about new distance records, increasing from the marketing figure of 20km to 100km from mountain top to mountain top, and ultimately up to 702 km across Europe from Lacuna’s weather balloon tests. It seemed frivolous to those who didn’t understand the intent, but these were important proof-points for Lacuna Space and now we routinely transmit over 1,000 km to small LEO satellites and 10,000 km to larger MEO satellites, and all using off-the-shelf LoRa radio chips with mW of battery power.
During the February 2018 event we proudly spoke about our first experiments from space, using a borrowed Norsat-2 satellite, thanks to our friends at Space Norway. This satellite would broadcast test signals down from space to simple receivers at the venue and led to the iconic “Tele-type” demo that caught everyone’s attention, mixing old mechanical machines with this ground-breaking new satellite capability. This came shortly ahead of our own first dedicated launch in March 2019.
Now after six years Lacuna has successfully launched ten satellites and iterated to our fifth generation of payload. In SatComms terminology the payload is the equivalent of the terrestrial gateway or cellular base station. This is a critical cornerstone of the overall solution and with a software-define-radio (SDR) implementation balances immense capacity with modest power consumption, given that satellites are entirely solar powered throughout their lifespan. This huge capacity is critical due to the physical geometry of the system, with satellites antenna beam producing a circular footprint on the ground with a diameter of hundreds of km, and so potentially containing millions of devices in view at any time. Each new generation of Lacuna payload has advanced in capacity and other technical parameters and is without doubt the most advanced satellite gateway developed today.
Along this journey, others have recognised Lacuna’s leadership and have adopted the solution on their own constellations. Omnispace utilise the payload in their ground stations, implementing the service via “bent-pipe” to MEO satellites in S-band. OneWeb carries the Lacuna payload on their next-gen technology demonstrator satellite named “Joeysat”. This network-of-networks approach provides a win-win for satellite operators, who are able to share and trade capacity with the other partners, and for users who benefit from the additive coverage and redundancy of multiple constellations.
With Lacuna Space now operating a commercial service, our theme for TTC24 is to showcase the multiple development options available for solutions providers to integrate satellite capabilities. The LoRaWAN ecosystem is vibrant and diverse, offering solutions for every conceivable use-case imaginable and the addition of satellite coverage allows these solutions to be deployed anywhere under the sky : a huge leap forward in “served area” of the globe. Lacuna Space will demonstrate how the ecosystem can take our standard modems, adapt their terrestrial sensors to translate through relays, or to develop their own bespoke sensors using open source and/or Lacuna professional support services. Reflecting on the past TTC’s makes us even more excited for September and for the progress still to come.