Questiny Group

Yesterday we completed our first quarterly technical review with the Navy SPAWAR on the development of our Land-Mobile SATCOM Network Simulator (LMSNS).  The review went very well, and the Navy was impressed with the progress we have made on the software design and development.  They were especially impressed with the degree of flexibility that our performance simulator will provide while at the same time allowing users to build up models over time, adding complexity as they uncover more details of the system they are trying to simulate.  This is important to them as many of the performance modeling tools they have require complete inputs to run.  These complete inputs can mean hundreds or thousands of entries into the simulator.  This is fine when you know them, but often you do not, and users want a simulator that can run with partial or simple inputs.  Further, simple models can provide insight into the effects of various changes that complex models may hide.  Such features and capabilities seemed to find a favorable ear with the Navy.  Next quarter, we continue to build our simulator.  We are rapidly closing on the design, and coding will begin in earnest in a week or so.  If you have interests or stories regarding satellite or wireless performance simulations, we would love to hear from you.  Please post any comments and stories.

A new year for us hear at Questiny. 2009 was a tough year for everyone in small businesses, but we survived with the help of our clients and we managed to close on the Phase II SBIR contract with the Navy to develop our Land-mobile SATCOM Network Simulator (LMSNS). As we enter 2010, we look forward to an improved economic climate, and the expansion of our business.

We have added Robert Hu to our ranks as the VP of Marketing and Business Development. Robert and I share many common interests, but he will bring new focus and energy to Questiny, and we are delighted to have him on board. Along with the addition of Robert Hu, Questiny will be developing a new Information Practice. This practice will apply some new tools to assist enterprises develop navigable knowledge networks. We are very excited about this new development as it goes beyond the Google and Bing search engines. All of us are dealing with the onslaught of vast quantities of information, and struggle to derive understanding from that information. Questiny has developed ways to help with that, and we are looking forward to introducing them to our clients this year. If you have particular issues managing information, please let us know. Perhaps you can be part of our beta tests to create a new way of understanding the information you see everyday.

We are making progress on the development of Questiny’s Land-mobile Satellite Network Simulator (LMSNS). We have just completed its ability to download two-line elements from NORAD, propagate those elements to a common time, and predict the satellite locations. Below is a plot of the satellite orbits for 200 minutes. The four satellite planes are clearly visible.

In addition, our tool can now estimate the visibility of the satellite relative to a location on the earth. We have taken a location of 0.0 degrees N, 0.0 degrees E, and determined the elevation angle to each of the satellites. This location was chosen as the equator provides the most pronounced gaps for LEO constellations. The satellites are spaced the farthest apart along the equator, so we felt that it might be a most interesting case. The orbit locations were calculated every 2 mintues throughout the 200 minute simulation duration. Calculating these elevation angles that were above 5 degrees and summing the number of such satellite at each time period results in the number of visible satellites. We have plotted this in the graph below.

The interesting thing about this plot is that most of the time an earth terminal will have good visibility to the constellation, but it is not without gaps. We see that there is about a 2 minute gap around 82 minutes into the simulation, and a one minute gap around 19 minutes into the simulation. That means using Orbcomm for continuous back-haul communications is difficult in the current constellation. The reasons for this gap may be due to an incomplete constellation. If so, these gaps would disappear when the constellation is fully populated. In addition to the technical algorithms and software, wer are making progress on the GUI as well. We currently have a mock-up of the GUI, and are developing a working prototype within Matlab. We hope to have furhter progress on it this week.

Questiny Group, Inc. is a technology & management consulting group with deep expertise in satellite/wireless communications and emerging technology development. Our consultants are recognized by clients throughout the industry for their expertise and business acumen. Questiny Group Inc. provides decision makers with pertinent and relevant decision information they need to achieve their business objectives. We offer in-depth experience and expertise in the field of satellite, wireless, media/networks and integrative analysis. Our value-add for our clients is bridging business objectives with emerging technologies using AccuSim analysis™ that leverages our clients’ core intellectual assets with business ROI. In short, Questiny Group engagement always results in higher ROI for our clients.

Clients Served:

• Lockheed-Martin
• Space Systems/LORAL
• Liberate Technologies
• Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego

Solutions:

• Wireless system engineering and design including requirements analysis and performance estimation
• Estimation of the intermodulation spectrum of saturated, non-linear amplifiers
• Satellite-to-mobile performance and capacity estimation
• Wireless system traffic analysis including bottleneck and queuing performance