After connecting with Artemis astronauts in space, this Canadian company plans to bring its tech to the Arctic

Pierre Renaud, vice president of engineering at Advantech Wireless Technologies Inc., joins BNN Bloomberg to spotlight Canada's future in space comms.

A Quebec company that helped power communications for NASA’s Artemis program now plans to position that same technology for a very different frontier: Canada’s Arctic.

As Ottawa ramps up defence and sovereignty efforts in the North, Advantech Wireless Technologies says systems designed to maintain contact between Earth and the moon could help close critical gaps in connectivity, surveillance and communications across some of the harshest environments on the planet.

“The work that we’ve been doing for these high power transfers apply to different applications,” says Pierre Renaud, the company’s vice president of engineering.

“They can be for commercial application. It can be for governmental applications and the developing needs of the whole Canadian ecosystem.”

Advantech says its equipment has already been operating in the Canadian Arctic for more than two decades, as well as within defence and commercial systems. Now, the company is looking to expand that footprint.

“We feel that we can play a good role in the upcoming governmental needs,” Renaud said, pointing to the company’s existing deployments in Arctic and NATO-related systems as proof it can support future missions.

• How NASA’s Artemis II mission is opening Canada’s space economy

From deep space to remote terrain

Advantech was originally contracted to develop high-power solid-state amplifiers capable of handling the specialized frequencies required for NASA’s lunar communications.

Those systems are designed to transmit signals across cislunar space, the vast region stretching from Earth to roughly two million kilometres away, where maintaining a stable connection requires significantly more power and precision than traditional satellite communications.

“This key know-how has been integrated into our towers and summit to platforms that can scale up to the very, very high power needed for transmission in deep space,” says Renaud.

He says the company has already deployed an initial set of transmitters for the Artemis-related mission and is preparing for future network demands as space agencies expand their lunar ambitions.

Renaud says the West Island of Montreal has become a major knowledge pool for both ground and space technology, with a high concentration of experts and hardware development occurring within just 15 kilometers of Advantech, which can contribute to the mission.