Marine VSAT: Luckily most of this is done for you … VSAT Maritime Regulatory article -

10. February 2012 07:17 / Leave a Comment / Alan Spicer

Luckily some of this will be done for you by the service provider when you get some kind of VSAT – Satellite Internet System on your marine vessel.

http://www.satellitetoday.com/via/satellitepolicies/A-Maritime-Regulatory-Strategy_35087.html

A clip of this says:

3. Take Note of Your Position

Where a vessel operates is the most important piece of information in planning your first-level strategy. There are three maritime geographical demarcations to calculate: territorial waters, ESV Boundary, and international waters.

Territorial Waters

Defined as the area starting from a nation’s coastline, territorial waters ending 12 nautical miles offshore. A country has the right to regulate transmissions within its territorial waters. For instance, a VSAT antenna operating within the territorial waters of Mexico might as well be transmitting from downtown Mexico City. In either case, an Earth station license from Mexico is needed. Therefore, while in territorial waters (including in-port operations), assume a local VSAT license is required.

ESV Boundary

This is defined as the area starting from territorial waters and ending 125 kilometers from the coastline for Ku-band or 300 kilometers for C-band. The ESV Boundary came about after the 2003 World Radio Conference, which required that vessels transmitting in the ESV Boundary obtain prior consent from local administrations. The ultimate decision of whether prior consent is required rests within the coastal nation itself. Generally, only a few nations require prior consent for C-band operations within their ESV Boundary, while nearly all countries require prior consent for C-band. But there are cases, such as in the United Kingdom, where C-band ESV operation are completely prohibited.

(more at the link above …)

KVH’s new fully global dual-mode C/Ku band VSAT system

* I found this on a discussion on LinkedIn – Marine Electronics Group. They are still a locked / closed group … so since the discussion thread couldn’t be discovered by a search engine like Google.com, I won’t quote it extensively. But it was in regards to a new system that KVH is offerring that has both C-band and Ku-band functionality for maintaining Internet connectivity on a global basis. This probably doesn’t matter to most of the sail and motor yachts because they don’t travel “The World” enough to need that. I will say that one person in-the-know asked the following:

“and thus the C band is more of a low quality backup than the full service capability one would get on a 2.2m or 2.4m C band antenna?”

… KVH guy basically agreed to that … but you might want to go and read the rest to be fair to KVH, and / or check with KVH and / or professional Marine Satellite System installers and maintainers for the final words on it before you make a decision …

P.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_Radio_Bands#ITU - Frequency Bands including what does KU and C band(s) mean? Noting that C band is 4 to 8 GHZ (GigaHertz) and KU band is 12 to 18 GHZ (GigaHerts) … Smaller antennas are possible in KU band than on C band because it is higher frequencies and higher frequencies use shorter antennas … On a marine vessel it is difficult to install an (C band) antenna (dish / radome assembly) of sufficient size to get the speed up to comparable with what can be done on the KU band. Supposedly you need a 2.2 to 2.4 Meter dish to accomplish this. But to be fair, KVH gentleman attempts to dispel this situation as no longer true because of algorithms and methods (significantly lower power spectral density … that’s cool huh?) used in their system. * Back to the future movie memorable quotes “… I’m your density …”

“There’s that word again, HEAVY, why are things so heavy in the future? Is there something wrong with the Earths gravitational pull?”

Noooo … it’s that damned Spectral Density!!!!