September 17, 2007 – WITH hours to go before the start of this year’s WAEA show in Toronto, followers of form are planning to run an eye over two new runners – one in the broadband antenna race, the other in the mad scramble of handheld IFE.

They are Germany’s QEST, showing an intriguing dual L/Ku-band antenna, and US company Wise DV, which broke cover on the eve of the show with a new portable IFE offering.

QEST’s Airborne Broadband Antenna is designed to combine the merits of Inmarsat’s near-globally available L-band capacity with the high capacity and lower costs of Ku-band, which has been chosen as the basis of their emerging broadband services by suppliers like Panasonic and Row 44. QEST sees Ku-band being used for the fast delivery of large volumes of data from the ground to the aircraft, with L-band providing the air-to-ground link and supplementary or fallback ground-to-air capacity.

QEST says its antenna combines light weight and minimal volume with ex-ceptional broadband and multi-band capability, high performance at the edge of the satellite footprint, a light and low-drag aircraft installation on the fuselage or the tail, high reliability and low lifecycle costs. “Compared with conventional airborne antennas, our technology provides a fourfold improvement in performance,” declares QEST chief technology officer Jörg Oppenländer. “It also eliminates dependency on a proprietary Ku-band service provider or signal encoding scheme.”

The company claims that the system will maintain the link from 0° to 90° throughout all standard flight manoeuvres. Inflight Online will be calling on QEST at WAEA to learn more about the company’s technology, develop-ment timetable and commercial prospects.

San Diego-based WiseDV has announced a new handheld IFE offering called ALvis, combining a compact player with a cabin wireless network for content loading. With storage for eight films plus music, information and games, the device has an eight-hour battery and a 4.3in screen. A more capable version, ALvis Plus, is designed to accommodate inputs from other aircraft equipment, including air-to-ground communications and aircraft-mounted video cameras.

On-aircraft infrastructure comprises a content server, the wireless network, a battery charger and a portable device for the management of player rentals. Inflight Online will be asking WiseDV how it plans to elbow its way into a melee already contested by established providers that include IMS, digEcor and e.Digital.