Antenna Control

Jamie Stutz

Among the many use cases for DataMiner, antenna control is one where DataMiner particularly shines, as it can greatly simplify, streamline, and standardize the control of your antennas.

With a customizable UI, DataMiner can bring together the status and control of an entire antenna farm in one place. This allows operators and engineers to quickly see the status and position of each antenna, whether you have to control 2 antennas or 20. DataMiner can provide a simple red-/-yellow-/-green health summary for your antenna farm, allowing you to see at a glance what’s going on.

Using a variety of different vendor products in your antenna farm? No problem. DataMiner is a completely vendor-independent platform that can communicate with equipment from any vendor so long as it has an interface such as an API, SNMP, serial or contact closures. This is an important factor not to be overlooked, as in addition to allowing you to see the status of all your gear in one place regardless of who made it, DataMiner standardizes the look and feel of the user interface so your end users don’t have to learn and access a variety of tools to run their day-to-day operations. With DataMiner’s library of thousands of existing device connectors already built and ready to go, you’ll likely be up and running quickly. And if Skyline doesn’t already have a connector, we can quickly build one for you.

DataMiner can help you simplify antenna operations by providing tools for your operators to configure your antennas at the click of a button. Want to move a dish to AMC 2? Simply select the desired satellite from the list and click Set Satellite! Want more manual control? DataMiner’s customizable UIs can easily be modified to include jog buttons for antenna fine-tuning or direct entry of azimuth, elevation, and polarity values.

More than just antenna control, DataMiner can also provide monitoring and control of the full uplink or downlink path, including equipment such as HPAs, baseball switches, demods, IRDs, shelter status (doors, environmental controls, etc.) and more. Working in conjunction with other DataMiner apps such as SRM (Service & Resource Management), DataMiner can even automate your uplink/downlink operations based on a predefined schedule by automatically moving your antennas into position, tuning IRDs, etc. So, no matter if your operation is large or small, DataMiner can help you standardize and automate your satellite operations to keep you running as efficiently as possible!

USE CASE DETAILS

Alarm indicators show your operators and engineers the current health status. For example, the yellow indicator (#1) shows that Antenna 31 is currently adjusting its azimuth position. Once the antenna finishes moving, the indicator will return to green. Red indicators (#2) show that a fault is occuring, in this case specifically with the azimuth of Antenna 32.

You can customize the UI and e.g. standardize it so users have a similar UI no matter what equipment they use. You can also consolidate control and monitoring of mulitple devices in a single user interface, so users have a complete overview of the health of your systems at a glance.

Simplify what can be complex operations at the click of a button. For example, users don't have to manually look up and set a specific elevation, azimuth, and polarization to dial in a new satellite. Instead, simply select the desired satellite and click the set button. What's more, DataMiner automation scripts can also be triggered from the button to support the configuration of the whole downlink chain.