XT Vuong came to the United States from Vietnam on a USAID scholarship in the turbulent 1960s to study electrical engineering at California State University. It would turn out to be one of the better investments made by the US Government. After graduate studies, he entered the industry and began work on a series of leading-edge projects for government and private-sector customers, from Canada’s Earth exploration Radarsat, NASA’s commercial initiatives for LEO mission support, Hughes’ Ka-band Spaceway, and Motorola’s Ka-band Teledesic. In a 36-year career, he has made many fundamental contributions to the technology of the satellite industry. The Vuong-Vuong Techniques used to calculate satellite link availability during rainfall are at the core of virtually all software that develops link budgets. The same is true of software for predicting sun transit outages, which make use of the Vuong-Forsey Technique. The IM Microscope (XT co-developed with Dr. Arnstein) is a convenient and effective technique to analyze and synthesize nonlinearities such as satellite high power amplifiers and anti-jamming devices. He developed and contributed to the two RF power-sharing satellite payload technologies called the Matrix Amplifier and Routing System (MARS) and Active Transmit Phased Array (ATPA). The MARS was first implemented at L-Band AMSC/TMI’s MSAT and Inmarsat-3 and will be implemented at Ku-band on board a Eutesat satellite scheduled for launch in 2016. But XT has always been as ready to help close a deal as to build leading-edge technology. The sales and service team knows that, wherever XT happens to be in the world, he is just a phone call away when it is time to solve a customer problem. Citing his contribution to command and control communications, a US Defense Department customer calls him an “unsung hero” in detecting and solving unforeseen complex problems in support of the warfighter. In the fourteen years he has worked at Artel, the company went from managing no satellite capacity to actively managing bandwidth on about 60 GEO satellites during the DSTS-G contract and positioned Artel as the largest bandwidth provider to the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. In a 10-year span from 2001 to 2011, Artel went from being a small business to a large business with substantial growth. Artel’s CEO has just one word to describe XT’s contribution to the creation of a major player in the industry: “instrumental.”
