RKF Engineering Solutions: Intuitive Operating System for Satellite Communication

This is the beginning of a new age in satellite communications,” declares David Marshack, Managing Director, RKF Engineering. “Users are demanding more capacity than ever before.” To address the need, new and complex systems are being developed and deployed ranging from High Throughput Satellites, MEO’s and LEO’s, to drones and balloons. However, for these innovations to be leveraged effectively there is a need to make them interoperable and coordinate seamlessly—this is where RKF has excelled since its inception in 2002. The Washington, DC-based company has designed software to model how these newer satellite systems will interact with each other and with those that are currently deployed. “As spectrum becomes more and more sought after, our tools allow us to help maximize its use,” remarks Marshack.

RKF is run by its founding partners, the communication engineering experts, Phil Rubin, CEO, Ted Kaplan, COO, Jeff Freedman, CTO and Marshack. The four have years of experience in supporting the satellite and telecom industries as well as government agencies. The result of such an extensive expertise culminates into building RKF’s Satellite Operating System. Like the operating system on a computer, the Satellite Operating System handles resources within the satellite, interaction with ground systems and connections to external software and systems. “Now our users can have end-to-end visibility and control at a level never before available,” extols Marshack. “We have spent several years and millions of dollars on research and development for this set of products to best serve our customers.” The company’s development team, led by Erik Halvorson, has written and rewritten Satellite Operating System code to make interactions between all the connected systems seamless.“This constant improvement cycle allows us to fold in new functionality and spread it across our infrastructure,” states Kaplan.

With a proactive team, RKF constantly seeks to enhance new areas in the satellite and telecommunication industry to benefit its clients.

As spectrum becomes more and more sought after, our tools allow us to help maximize its use

The development team working in an integrated environment focuses in delivering better product by adding new functionality to the software regularly. The company’s belief in open sharing of ideas and learning from each other develops a dynamic working environment for the employees, where everyone sees themselves as a contributor to the solution. This results in a better development of the product and increases the probability of customer satisfaction.

With a wide variety of clients ranging from government agencies to satellite operators to large technology companies, RKF has benefited each one of them with its products, solutions and services in the telecom and satellite arena. For instance, a client of RKF needed to deploy multiple satellites providing coverage over specific areas across the U.S. The client had an internal engineering team who spent months optimizing their design. RKF wrote custom software to model the satellite and improved the design efficiency by over twenty-percent. “In the world of satellites, which are typically over a hundred million dollars to build and launch and are deployed for fifteen years, a twenty-percent bump in efficiency is a huge win,” states Marshack. For the past several years, RKF has developed software with an aim to maximize the efficiency of satellite systems. With a vision to counter challenges in the coming future, RKF focuses on adding consistent improvements to its software that support advanced systems with onboard processing, beamforming and channelizing. “As the satellite industry expands to modern High Throughput Systems and next-generation Non- Geostationary Satellite Orbit (NGSO) systems, this software will enable them to achieve their maximum potential,” concludes Marshack.