When you've finished marvelling at the sheer bulk of the Airbus A380 on show flying here this week, take a look along the upper fuselage of the giant airliner. You should just be able to make out the CMC Electronics satcoms antenna that will provide megabits of passenger connectivity from the end of next year.

CMC Electronics (Hall 3, D7/2) was selected to provide the new CMA-2102LW electronically steered phased-array high-gain antenna as supplier-furnished equipment (SFE) for the A380 and Airbus's other long-haul types.

A lightweight version of CMC's best-selling CMA-2102, the antenna will support a total of up to 1.7Mbit/sec data throughput to the aircraft following the introduction of Inmarsat's new SwiftBroadband service in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Also making its Paris debut is the compact SatLite for business jet, regional and narrowbody applications. Capable of supporting Inmarsat Classic voice and low-rate data services, the 64kbit/sec Swift64 and the 432kbit/sec-per-channel SwiftBroadband, SatLite features an integrated rather than a separate beam-steering unit.

It is also designed to work with current-generation ARINC 741 satcoms transceivers as well as the compact systems being designed to the ARINC 781 standard, due to be finalised by the end of the year.

Completing CMC's Inmarsat antenna range is the CMA-2200. This intermediate-gain system supports Inmarsat's Aero I service, which was designed to provide Aero H levels of service (voice and data at up to 10.5kbit/sec) through simpler and cheaper equipment on aircraft operating within Inmarsat-3 satellite spot-beams.

Source: Flight Daily News