Astrapi defines and controls an entirely new field – spiral modulation. Spiral
modulation addresses an acute problem - the spectrum crisis. The spectrum crisis
impacts four massive market opportunities for Astrapi – satellite, both near-earth and
deep space, terrestrial wireless, including 5G+, defense and IoT.
Satellite VSAT- Goal is to deploy more high-throughput systems, Low Earth Orbit constellations with
improved ground station equipment to enable spot beams with reduced antennae size/cost resistant
to interference. More transponder capacity, therefore fewer satellites, better interference mitigation
improve Quality of Service and reduce guard band requirements, reduce cost and CAPEX to compete
with terrestrial high-throughput offerings.
Terrestrial Wireless – OFDM, carrier frequency and sample clock offset, interference due to adjacent
transmitters due to high channel blocker at the receiver create demodulation and noise performance
issues. High Peak-to-Average Power (PAPR) for OFDM signal requires a Power Amplifier that must be
oversized in terms of average power which limits applications for laptops, tablets, etc. – it’s the
battery. A higher degree of accuracy in synchronization with less power enables the SPDM modem to
reduce overhead in synchronization signaling. SPMD provides the ability to reduce PAPR of the power
amplifier. Aided by SPDM, lower power requirements should enable OEMs to dramatically lower their
total cost to manufacture. SPMD minimizes coherent interference performance loss by exploiting
dramatically increased waveform design flexibility.
Defense – Rifleman Radio, NET Warrior – power/weight/extension of mission, anti-jamming…Same
throughput using less power, requires fewer batteries, lessens the load on the soldier, extends the
mission life and the novel waveform is hard to find, and through over-sampling resistant to jamming
effort. Rogue actors won’t know what they are looking. Cognitive radios with AI functionality for
defense spectrum sharing applications.
5G or 5G+ – propagation deterioration at higher frequencies, fat pipe 60 GHz CAPEX real estate
challenges, interference due to density, MIMO beamforming needs increased baseband processing
capacity all leading to network management quality of service issues…We think spiral modulation is an
enabling technology, though we are focused on other uses now.