Radomes have been used for decades to protect critical ground station infrastructure for satellite communications networks and national security applications. Radomes are indispensable components of the system protecting equipment from degraded performance due to weather, providing storage for critical spares, housing sensitive support electronics, and limiting observation of operational activity. Maintaining these structures has typically fallen to an onsite team but as the number of antennas and ground stations increases, this is no longer feasible.

What if you could automate tasks and monitor equipment status remotely in real time, requiring fewer technicians to maintain more locations? The human interface to equipment has improved dramatically in the last few decades, sensors of all kinds are far more cost effective, and increasingly programs and AI assistants can handle the inspection part of routine maintenance. Facilities that once had full time technical teams are moving toward lights-out operations. This is possible with automation, continuous monitoring and status reporting, and the connections in place to protect valuable equipment with timely responses when malfunctions occur. This new normal calls for easily deployed solutions that provide smarter monitoring, data collection to predict optimum maintenance intervals, and remote reporting.

With fewer operators and maintainers available to maintain not just one but multiple sites, ground station operators need technology that works harder and smarter for them. Traditional radome outfitting results in limited automation and no status reporting, is ad hoc site by site, and requires contracting with and managing multiple trades for power, security, smoke detection, and others.

Smart Monitoring: The Key to Modern Ground Station Operations

The Radome Accessories Control Center (RACC) from Skywire Design is the pre-wired control center for radome support systems — lighting, blowers, air conditioners, fire detection system, power distribution and remote status monitoring. Designed to simplify and standardize the electrical outfitting of a radome, the RACC helps streamline the set-up of a radome with installation taking hours instead of days. How does this help understaffed ground stations?

• Automatic Blower Operation – Ventilation blowers responsive to temperatures and relative humidity in the radome save energy, reduce noise levels, and prevent equipment failures from overheated electronics.
• Aspirating Smoke Detection – Whether moved by passive convection currents or by forced circulation, the air in a radome moves from bottom to top. The RACC’s solid state smoke detector continuously samples air from the top of the radome, providing early notification of incipient fire in the radome. The detector can sound alarms from a standalone mode or communicate with any existing fire alarm control panel for automatic notification of the fire department.
• “Whole House” Surge Suppression – Durable, fast surge suppression applied to the included load center protects every connected electrical circuit, defending all the circuits from the stress of voltage surges and spikes, regardless of their source.

Rapid setup of a complete out-of-the-box design makes provisioning of all these benefits easy. The RACC is a single panel to which all auxiliary radome electrical systems can be connected, and from which they can be powered, monitored, and controlled.  The RACC monitors equipment operation and other status information, ensures the required responses, and communicates status on demand to remote operators.

Being connected remotely to all this status information means daily maintenance checks become automatic, continuous checks available from your office or your favorite beach or the exhibit hall of the next international industry show you’re attending next week.

Why the RACC?

It seems so simple right? Your engineering team could probably design this equipment. The question is, when are you going to get that done? The RACC is a second-generation product developed with the benefit of a decade of installation and maintenance experience.

For less that the annual salary of one trained site engineer, the RACC can be your eyes and ears for the next decade and beyond. One piece of equipment, easy to assemble and operate, saves thousands of dollars in custom engineering and vendor coordination cost, and thousands more in operational costs. It might even be the case that this makes monitoring affordable where previously design time and manufacturing costs prohibited consideration. With the right automation working with you, monitoring and maintaining your ground stations can be less time consuming and more reliable than you previously ever dared hope.