1. COMPANY REPORT Satellite Uplink Station, Netherlands
CASTOR:
More than an Uplink Station
• Internet and TV uplink for cruise ships
TELE-satellite Magazine • Data services for specific user groups
Business Voucher
www.TELE-satellite.info/12/03/castor-satellite-uplink
• Uplink for many Dutch radio channels
• Downlink/encoding for IPTV providers
Direct Contact to Sales Manager
• Free capacity for additional uplink customers
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2. COMPANY REPORT Satellite Uplink Station, Netherlands
TV, Radio and
Internet Uplinks
for Europe
and Africa
■ Edwin Cras is Managing
Director of the satellite uplink
station CASTOR. He is an
enthusiastic satellite DXer
that has been reading TELE-
satellite for many years. “My
first satellite dish was a 1.5-
meter antenna that I installed
in 1990.” Today he uses a
motorized 2.0-meter antenna
at home. He absolutely enjoys
being at CASTOR and working
with all those large dishes
every day; it’s something that a
private satellite DXer can only
dream of.
ë Burum
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3. If you ever find yourself traveling in vice Providers,” comments Edwin Cras, at 14W while the other one is aligned with
northern Holland through the town of “which includes for example the Miami INTELSAT 906 at 64E.” Both of these up-
Burum, you won’t be able to help but based company MTN, one of the largest links are used for maritime data transmis-
notice the giant satellite antenna farm. in this segment.” MTN has been using sions. CASTOR has also been uplinking
Large 32-meter antennas stand along- CASTOR Teleport for many years to pro- transponders for the Dutch DTH bouquet
side 16.4-meter dishes as well as many vide Internet service as well as their own Canal Digitaal from Burum using a 9 me-
nine-meter antennas. There’s also a large onboard TV channels to cruise ships at ter antenna on Astra 3B.
assortment of smaller dishes of all sizes. this side of the globe. “For these custom-
The groundstation used to belong to the ers we put our largest system into ser- CASTOR has been offering occasional
Dutch telecommunications provider KPN vice: the 16.4-meter dish that is fixed on capacity (short SNG transmissions) since
but is now owned by Stratos, a leading NSS12 at 57 east.” 2010. “We have leased an entire tran-
provider for Inmarsat services. Ivo Veld- sponder with 54 MHz bandwidth on AM44
kamp successfully negotiated a manage- The 16.4-meter dish is not the only an- at 11W and use it to offer SNG transmis-
ment buy-out in early 2005 and estab- tenna that was added since the founding sions”, Edwin Cras tells us, “One hour of
lished CASTOR. As a result CASTOR has of the company; nine-meter dishes were transmission time with a bandwidth of 36
become an important provider at the Bu- also added. “Three of our five 9.0-meter MHz costs 600 Euros with us.” The band-
rum Teleport together with Stratos itself. antennas are used for the Ku-band: one is width is precisely set up for an HD chan-
pointed to AM1 at 40E, another to ASTRA nel. “Customers can select the slots on
Managing Director Edwin Cras told us 3B at 23.5E and the third is aligned with their own through our online booking sys-
more about those early days: “We start- EUTELSAT W2A at 10E.” We were sur- tem”, he adds.
ed with seven employees; they had con- prised to learn what these satellites are
trol over a total of six antennas: a small used for; Edwin Cras explains: “They are But CASTOR’s main source of earnings
4.6-meter dish, two 6.0-meter antennas used to provide passenger planes with comes from ‘closed user groups’. Ed-
and three of the large 9.0-meter giants.” Internet access so that the passengers win Cras explains what that means: “We
The young company proved to be suc- don’t have to do without their laptops or have, for example, a European country
cessful in the market and has been able Smartphones.” For this service CASTOR
to increase their sales from four million handles both the uplink and downlink In-
Euros back then towards almost 10 mil- ternet traffic, The remaining two nine-
lion Euros today. “We grow between 10 meter dishes are used for the C-band.
and 20% every year.” “One of them is pointed to EXPRESS A4
Who are the heavyweights for CASTOR
at the Burum Teleport? “An important
part of our business is with Maritime Ser-
■ Administrative building in
Burum in northern Holland,
where CASTOR rents offices
from Stratos.
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4. 1 2
as a customer that wants to provide their
embassies in Africa with secure Internet
3 service.” For this customer CASTOR pro-
vides the uplink and downlink Internet
connection not only for their internal op-
eration but also for the public Internet.
“Other similar customers are mining com-
panies or oil companies that want to link
all of their branch offices together.” This
business segment makes up about 50%
of CASTOR’s total sales. Edwin Cras is ex-
pecting that this will increase to 70% by
2013.
CASTOR has an ideal location in the
flatlands of northern Holland: “We can
see all the satellites from 70.5E to 55W.”
Their Burum location is just one part of
CASTOR. “We also operate another up-
link station in Hilversum south of Amster-
1. Edwin Cras in the engineering area
2. The 16.4-meter antenna is controlled from
here. The satellite beacon signal receiver
is at the top. In the middle is the control
system for the antenna with a display of
the actual value of the antenna (at the top
of the display) and the desired value (at the
bottom of the display) of the antenna for,
in this case, the NSS-12 satellite. The LNB
controller is at the bottom. If an LNB should
fail, this system automatically switches
over to the spare LNB.
3. The labeling gives it away: the TV
channels received by CASTOR from the
Congo for an IPTV provider are processed
here.
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5. ■ CASTOR uses this dish
to receive the TV channels
from the Congo off of the
RASCOM satellite at 2E.
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6. dam.” This location is very active with the
uplink of radio stations. He lists them:
“We have been uplinking for Radio 538,
Sky Radio, Veronica, Slam FM, 100%NL as
well as Arrow Rock and Arrow Jazz since
the early ‘90s.“ But that’s still not enough.
CASTOR is developing another business
sector: “We receive the satellite channels
for IPTV providers who then offer them to
customers via the Internet.” One of them
is the IPTV provider ‘Bouquet Uhuru’ with
TV channels from the Congo that CASTOR
receives in the C-band from the RASCOM
satellite at 2E. Another is the provider
‘Premier Satellite’ with some English lan-
guage TV channels from ASTRA at 28.2E.
From the original seven employees it
has become 14 and CASTOR is involved
in many activities in many different ar-
eas that should allow them to tackle any
future opportunities. “Since we have so
many antennas of different sizes available
to us, we can react very quickly to any re-
quests”, comments Edwin Cras and then
continues, “And because of our inexpen-
sive rates we are very attractive to new
customers.”
1. One of CASTOR’s prominent customers
is the American firm MTN. They provide
cruise ships with TV and Internet services.
Here we see the four-way C-band amplifiers
with redundany for CASTOR’s satellite
uplink with three-way redundancy.
1 2. VSAT platform (iDirect) for one of the
‘closed user group’ customers.
2
210 TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 02-03/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com