What is soft handover in SATCOM and why is it important?

• A. Overlapping beams to prevent dropouts.
• B. Relates to ground station provisioning.
• C. Involves overlapping beams to prevent dropouts during handover.
• D. Using a single beam at a time.

Answer: (C)

Soft handover means the terminal stays connected to more than one beam (often from different satellites) during the transition from one beam to another. By keeping an overlap where both beams are active, the network can add the new link before releasing the old one, so there’s no momentary drop in service. This overlap is what makes the handover seamless, which is especially important in SATCOM where even brief outages can disrupt voice or data sessions and affect quality of service. The other choices don’t fully capture the mechanism: one describes overlapping beams without tying it to the handover process, another points to ground station provisioning rather than the handover method, and using a single beam at a time describes a hard handover with a potential dropout.