Iridium Based Communications with UAV

Many Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platforms are moving away from traditional line of sight methods in favor of satellite communication systems for improved range. This comes for a tradeoff of increased capabilities and improved range for less bandwidth throughput, more weight and additional data plan costs.  The purpose of this project is to determine system requirements, select a SATCOM network and hardware and integrate the chosen system into an existing UAV platform in order to meet a set of assumed requirements for this project.  This will be done by determining what system requirements are needed to complete the mission, researching available networks, selecting hardware based off of the previous choices, ensuring that the selected hardware will perform the job by testing assumptions, and then integrating the system into a UAV.