Gateways for satellite internet must follow low-orbit satellites across the sky and hand over from one to the next. The hardest passes are the ones that look easiest: straight overhead.
The keyhole
On an azimuth-elevation mount, a pass near the zenith demands a sudden, very fast swing in azimuth. No practical motor keeps up, and the link drops at the best moment of the pass.
Planning around it
A mount with more freedom, such as a hexapod or a three-axis design, removes that singularity. The software side matters as much: predicting the overhead set for each site, scheduling handovers by remaining pass time and slew cost, and testing it all on a digital twin before any hardware moves. This is one of the platforms we have in design.
