Ground Stations

Optical Ground Stations (OGS) is a thriving trend towards point-to-point communications. Laser links ensure high data rates during availability and highly directive beams to counterattack interference issues. However, despite the advantages that optical links offer, evolution of laser communications was subject to the susceptible nature of optical frequencies. Space-to-space optical communications have been growing, while space-to-ground links pose a series of challenges, as frequencies in the THz range suffer severe decadence due to harsh weather conditions. The installation of an OGS is thus a challenging task, demanding the consideration of a variety of parameters. The development of Adaptive Optics systems is the state-of-art in the direction of mitigating weather effects and offering dependable and fully available optical services.

Furthermore, the progress in quantum mechanics has enabled the development of security ensuring methods based upon properties of quantum particles. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is an emerging technique offering high security and minimized vulnerability, which enables two parties to produce and share a key which is used to encrypt and decrypt messages.

The combination of the advantages that optical communications offer along with the QKD properties is a goal satisfying the core of requirements in telecommunications, combining directivity, high spectrum efficiency and safety. OHB offers fully deployable solutions as its heritage includes several optical links projects and has proved to be one of the leading forces worldwide.