Skynopy provides end-to-end ground station service
Headquarters
Paris, France
Headcount
20+ employees
Industry
Space
Website
Case Study: Skynopy removes on-site engineer deployments from RF compatibility testing
Skynopy is an end-to-end ground station service provider. As its customer base grew, every new satellite mission triggered an RF compatibility test that locked one or two engineers to the customer site for up to a week. Skynopy deployed Connektica to digitize and automate its test sequences, enabling customers to run RF validation sessions independently from any location. The first autonomous session ran remotely from Palo Alto, California. Today, Skynopy ships the test suitcase and monitors execution from its own office, keeping engineering capacity free to scale the customer base without scaling the team proportionally.
Key results
- 2 engineers per RF compatibility test campaign freed from on-site commitments, with sessions now running autonomously from any customer location worldwide.
- 2 months from first access to a fully operational, customer-ready test sequence, adapting an existing Python codebase to Connektica's interface.
- Full code isolation enforced through Connektica's multi-tenant access model
- Manual reporting replaced by automatic record capture, with test reports generated directly from the execution sequence.
Challenges
Every new satellite mission Skynopy onboards requires an RF compatibility test. The test verifies that the radio hardware going on-board is compatible with Skynopy’s ground station network, and it runs on the RF suitcase, a portable hardware-and-software solution that represents an image of the ground segment.
Before Connektica, executing that test meant engineers physically traveling to the customer’s facility and staying for the duration of the campaign, which sometimes lasted a full week if customers required additional support. For a small RF team, that was a recurring and compounding constraint. The test sequence lived on a database, with parameters and results entered manually which made it hard to maintain a source of truth. Moreover, reports had to be prepared manually to share with the customers.
Two constraints were non-negotiable. First, many of Skynopy’s customers are satellite startups without in-house RF expertise. They could not run tests alone without a structured, guided interface. Second, Skynopy’s test codebase is proprietary. Any remote testing setup had to protect it entirely. The tipping point came after the first on-site customer deployment “We saw that it was not very scalable, sometimes the tests go on for longer than expected and we have other commitments”, Alexandre Michel, RF Engineer at Skynopy recalls.
Solution
Choosing Connektica: Python execution, code isolation, and structured test output
Skynopy had no prior experience with a dedicated test execution platform. What made Connektica immediately viable was its ability to run Python scripts. Skynopy’s entire test codebase is in Python, so the team could adapt existing scripts directly rather than rebuilding from scratch. As Stefano Ciccotosto, Lead RF Engineer at Skynopy, put it: “it’s a framework that allows you to easily build automated code to run complex tests in a sequential approach.”
Two hard requirements framed the selection:
- Configuration and results had to be linked in the same record, and
- Customers needed a web interface to run tests without any access to the underlying code.
Connektica’s Local Worker, running inside the suitcase server, satisfied both. It connects Skynopy’s Python code to the Connektica web interface and surfaces results, curves, and logs to the customer without exposing internal code.
Two months to full customer deployment
Skynopy’s test sequences already existed. Implementation was about adapting them to Connektica’s interface, not rewriting them. The hardest part was integrating test curves and result logs from subthreads to flow cleanly into an easy-to-use user interface for their customers. Jeremy Weill, Digital Signal Processing Engineer, described the moment it clicked: “when you want to automate something for a user, the most complex thing is to make him understand what you want and what he has to do. When I saw the personalization, putting text boxes, multiple-choice inputs, and translating that into running code, that was exactly what we were looking for.
From first access to a fully operational and customer-ready sequence, Skynopy took two months to configure Connektica, accelerated by weekly support sessions with the Connektica team.
Benefits
Engineers freed from on-site test commitments
Before Connektica, every RF compatibility test meant one or two engineers for the test duration. Now Skynopy has the option to ship the RF suitcase and monitor results remotely from its own office, wherever the customer is in the world. The first autonomous session ran from Palo Alto, 9,000 kilometers and nine time zones from Skynopy’s team. “We woke up and saw that everything was working,” said Alexandre Michel, RF Engineer at Skynopy.
Structured traceability replacing manual data entry
Configuration and results are now captured automatically within the same execution record, replacing manual database entry. Report generation follows directly from the sequence run, with no data reconstruction needed.
“All the parameters were well written in the report and it could almost be directly sent.”- Alexandre Michel
A scalable foundation for customer growth
Under the previous workflow, personalizing test sequences and reports for each new customer would have quickly become unmanageable. Connektica gives Skynopy the flexibility to adapt to each customer’s configuration without rebuilding from scratch.
“Connektica allows us to make this sequential and automatic, without having to manually click buttons and launch scripts.” – Jeremy Weill.
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