Quasar Satellite Technologies

Quasar Satellite Technologies is a Sydney, Australia-based ground station technology company spun out of CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation — Australia's national science agency) that is developing what it claims is the world's first truly digital multibeam phased array ground station system capable of communicating with hundreds of LEO satellites simultaneously from a single physical installation. Traditional satellite ground stations use dish antennas that mechanically point at one satellite at a time; even electronically-steered phased arrays commercially available have been limited to a handful of simultaneous beams. As LEO constellations from SpaceX (Starlink), Planet Labs, ICEYE, Spire, and hundreds of other operators fill low Earth orbit with thousands of satellites, the need for ground infrastructure that can serve many satellites per overhead pass simultaneously — rather than one after another — becomes acute. Quasar's digital beamforming architecture splits the signal processing digitally, allowing software-defined beam patterns that can independently track many satellites across different orbital planes simultaneously. This dramatically increases the effective contact time and data throughput a single physical site can achieve, improving the economics of ground-as-a-service (GaaS) operations for commercial satellite operators. The CSIRO heritage gives Quasar access to Australia's world-class radio science expertise (CSIRO's ASKAP and Parkes radio telescopes have made fundamental contributions to multi-beam receiver technology).