07 October 2024
Debmarine Namibia, a joint venture owned by the government of the Republic of Namibia and De Beers, mines in the offshore mining licence area off the southern coast of the country, some 90-150m below sea level. The company’s vessels mine diamonds from the ocean floor using advanced drill technology supported with sophisticated tracking, positioning and surveying equipment.
A new vessel
Debmarine Namibia commissioned a new N$7 billion custom-built vessel to expand annual production by around 45% with an additional 500,000 carats of high value diamond. The new Benguela Gem vessel was fitted out with proprietary mission equipment by De Beers Marine South Africa.
Taking two years to construct, it was the most technically advanced diamond recovery vessel in the world, underpinned by high standards of sustainability and safety performance. The vessel combines the latest technology and a fully integrated design to achieve unrivalled efficiency, reliability and accuracy. A state-of-the-art dynamic positioning system automatically optimises the vessel’s performance in changing weather conditions to minimise energy use. It also generates its own fresh water using heat recovery systems and a reverse osmosis plant.
The vessel was communicating to shore using a Line-of-Sight (LOS) system which had become obsolete since its 2022 launch, offering throughput of less than 25Mbps. The growing need for information to be transferred from the vessel to shore caused the client to investigate more efficient and cost-effective technologies. Indeed, the MV Benguela Gem required a communication system to provide a bi-directional IP (data and video) feed between the shore and the vessel.
Ship to shore
Ceragon’s PointLink Access was identified as one such technology that could amp up essential ship to shore communications.
The marine-grade Point to Point (PtP) and Point to Multi Point (PtMP) connectivity system provides a secured, high capacity, low latency solution, enabling offshore and maritime operations. It integrates highly reliable microwave equipment with customised antenna stabilisation technologies as well as resilient paths and topologies to provide high reliability.
The PointLink Access enables effective communication to smaller vessels and mobile users, with communication based on technologies like LTE/4G in licensed frequency bands, WiFi in unlicensed bands and microwave links in both licensed and unlicensed bands. Following the installation by Altron Nexus, the Benguela Gem gained high-capacity connections with more than 50Mbps full duplex speeds to a maximum distance of 80km, and with less than 1ms link availability for minimum capacity and maximum distance better than 99%. Link availability for 200Mbps and 40km distance was also better than 99.99%.
The compact lightweight design saved valuable deck-space on board the Benguela Gem, and with a total weight of approximately 25kg including data modem, antenna and 60cm radome, the system was easy to install. Software controls the orientation of the directional antenna, securing optimal link margin in systems deployed on moving vessels and platforms. The system features automatic switchover between sectors in a multi-sector system, and automatic multi-homing in a distributed base station network. Dual axis actuators compensate for pitch & roll motions up to +80/-30 degrees, with the help of motion sensors. Combined with accurate heading information from the GPS compass, the system ensures a unique pointing accuracy even under highly dynamic conditions.
Each microwave connection consists of a dedicated onshore PointLink antenna system. On the vessel, a dual PointLink antenna system is required, which enables true 360-degree connectivity between the vessel and the ground station at Kerbehuk. A high power RFU-D-HP radio is connected to the microwave radio antenna which has 35db (4&5GHz) / 37dB (6/7GHz) output power and a covered radome to protect both microwave and internal stabilisation systems. This proposed configuration is for very long links over the sea and in areas with difficult propagation conditions.
The link will benefit from small frequency diversity improvements by using two separate frequency carriers/connection from one dual core radio. Both carriers have the capacity to support modulations from QPSK – 4096 QAM. The available capacity and modulation schemes are limited by capacity activation keys. Current considered modulations are from BPSK to 32 QAM to deliver up to 100Mbps per carrier; however, 200Mbps capacity is possible with both radios having both cores activated running in an MC ABC configuration.
Supporting the Namibian economy
With the richest known marine diamond deposits in the world and being among the top 10 country producers of gem quality diamonds globally, Debmarine Namibia can now continue to support the Namibian economy with its lucrative diamond mining activities, supported by the most modern wireless communications capabilities available.
