Amazonas 5 reaches its orbital position and enters service

Once the space testing phase has been completed, Hispasat's eleventh satellite is now in its position at 61º West. It houses a prototype of an optical radio frequency distributor that can be important especially in satellites that carry Ka band.

Amazon 5 Hispasat It is now in its final orbital position at 61º West and has begun to offer the telecommunications services for which it was designed, after having successfully passed the exhaustive tests carried out in space.

The satellite, built by Space Systems Loral (SSL) at its facilities in Palo Alto (California), has coverage over the entire American continent and has an estimated useful life of 15 years. Hispasat's Brazilian subsidiary, Hispamar, will be the company in charge of operating the satellite.

The great technological capacity of the Amazonas 5 allows it to offer a wide range of communication services, both in Ku band and Ka band. Through the Ku band, it will provide high-performance direct-to-home television (DTH) services and will allow television service providers that operate with Hispasat to transmit 500 new channels, which will consolidate 61º Oeste as a leading position in the diffusion of these services in Latin America. This satellite will also be key to promoting 4K TV in the region.

The Ka-band beams will provide quality and competitive broadband connectivity and satellite Internet access services to more than half a million people in several countries in Central and South America. In addition, Amazonas 5 will offer operators in the region transport or backhaul services to deploy their 3G and 4G cellular networks, and even 5G.

Launched on September 12 from the Baikonour Cosmodrome (Kazakhstan) aboard a Proton Breeze M from the ILS company, Amazonas 5 is the eleventh satellite in the fleet and its launch coincided with the same day that, 25 years ago, the company launched, from French Guiana, the first Spanish telecommunications satellite into space, Hispasat 30W-1 (Hispasat 1A).

Innovation in the Amazon 5

Hispasat, faithful to its innovative vocation and the support it provides to the Spanish industry, has embarked on the Amazonas 5, for testing, an experimental cargo developed by DAS Photonics. It is an optical radio frequency distributor, a prototype of a system that can be important especially in satellites that carry Ka band since, being multibeam missions, they require a very high number of receivers. With this new element, the complexity in the satellite input section would be greatly reduced, where hundreds of frequency conversions must be carried out that in the future could be done with this single component, which would distribute the signals to each receiver. This would also reduce the mass and volume of the satellite and improve the isolation between signal transmission and reception.