Bridging the gap: enhancing connectivity and coverage beyond offshore wind farms

Empowering coastal surveillance
Offshore wind farms, located 10 to 20 nautical miles from shore, present significant communications challenges due to the high density of wind turbines. The turbines create interference and blind spots that hinder effective communications and surveillance at sea. Maintaining reliable communications by extending beyond line of sight (BLOS) coverage and overall communications range is paramount.
By integrating VHF/UHF radios into wind turbines, operators can ensure reliable communications even in blind spots, enabling remote control from shore stations to sea and therefore improving operational efficiency.

Offshore wind farm

Your task

Operators have to ensure voice and data radio communications at sea by extending coverage range. This improved connectivity is critical for safe operations, timely emergency response and efficient, reliable communications to vessels. This improved coverage also has to meet communications network requirements: the system must enable reliable voice and data transmission in both directions to ensure the right information gets to the right place in real time. Operators have to cope with the offshore operational challenges wind farms present, such as shadowing, RF interference and low signal quality due to dense turbine arrays. At the same time, operators need robust communications systems designed to perform optimally in harsh offshore environments.

R&S®M3SR Series4400 software defined radios

Rohde & Schwarz solution

To address these challenges Rohde & Schwarz offers the R&S®M3SR Series4400 software defined radios. The radios are mounted at strategic turbine locations to form relay or mesh links that reduce multipath and blockage effects and provide beyond line of sight coverage. The R&S®M3SR Series4400 radios support IP-based backhauls (e.g. LTE/5G, satellite) and establish encrypted, authenticated connections to control centers. Centralized management enables remote configuration, OTA software updates, diagnostics and automated failover. Each unit is installed in a ruggedized housing to withstand the harsh offshore environment (salt spray, humidity, lightning, etc.) and is designed for minimal maintenance, increased overall network availability, resilience and operational security.

Enhanced area of communications through radio sites at wind farms

Benefits

Minimized RF shadowing to eliminate coverage gaps behind and around the wind farms
Extended RF coverage to enable beyond line of sight connectivity
Reduced deployment costs by leveraging existing turbine masts, which substantially extends radio range due to increased antenna height
Fully compliant with interoperability requirements between navies
Communications using all navy waveforms

Application

R&S®M3SR Series4400 software defined radios represent the latest generation of radios for multi-domain communications solutions. The radios meet highest quality standards to provide maximum RF performance and are highly valued by security authorities and government organizations around the world.

The R&S®M3SR Series4400 radios can be used to:

Secure voice and data communications
Avoid blind spots: by deploying VHF/UHF transceivers as relay/mesh nodes on selected turbines, significantly increasing coverage due to high position on turbine masts and location off shore

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Bridging the gap: enhancing connectivity and coverage beyond offshore wind farms - Application Card

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