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Madhumathi D.S.

BANGALORE, June 16

AFTER nearly five years of wait for the right space signals and a jinxed technology tie-up, Indian-made satellite phones will soon be a reality.

Defence electronics major, Bharat Electronics, has gone ahead to develop briefcase-type sat phones jointly with a DRDO lab. The portable gizmos - no less but not to be confused with the snazzy hand-held Iridium types for civilian use - will be primarily meant for the Defence and paramilitary forces.

The gadgets allow two-way voice, data and fax transmission from remote locations. Coming as they do with encryption and riding on the national satellite bandwidth, they will fill a critical need in safe Defence communication, said Mr S.K. Mehta, Director R&D, BEL.

"We are currently working with the DRDO (Defence Research & Development Organisation) to make briefcase type sat phones. The product will hopefully be in a position to go for evaluation (by the Defence authorities) by the end of this year," Mr Mehta told Business Line.

Initially, 1,000 pieces of the gadget, made with the bulk of its software and hardware developed indigenously, would be produced at the existing facilities in Bangalore or Ghaziabad units at no additional investment. BEL has ready encryption technology and has begun preliminary work on the models.

The number, according to him, would be the minimum immediate market from the joint services staff, who have been waiting for it for some time. Although there was some snap import during the Kargil battle, lack of encryption and service by hubs outside the country did not make it a comfortable option.

Eventually, other users could crop up, such as police and forces operating in forests, said Mr D. Krishna Gopal, GM (Systems), Bangalore. Each of them could have different encryptions.

Although the sat phone gadgets could cost a couple of lakh of rupees and weigh a cumbersome 3-5 kg, they are portable and provide all-weather service anywhere. More than that, they enable communication that cannot be intercepted as in the case of high-frequency information that is currently used, they said.

The sat phone service will use the INSAT MSS (mobile satellite service) that is now available on the satellite systems INSAT 3B, 3C and the latest test case, the GSAT-2. However, their relatively low-power transponders allow only the briefcase type, Mr Mehta said. The existing hubs of the DRDO and the ISRO would be used while an older C-DoT hub may be modified to suit the INSAT MSS design.

Around 1998, BEL had planned to be involved in a sat phone terminal venture between C-DoT and US firm Comsat Labs - once with Lockheed Martin and now a part of ViaSat Inc. The project never took off, for one as the US company frequently changed hands, and for the other, because the INSAT MSS which enables the sat phones did not click.

Last year, as a stop-gap move, BEL developed and supplied 100 reporting terminals - which allow one-way short and emergency messaging - for the meteorology department for search and rescue operations. The technology was from the ISRO's Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad.

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