Cobham Satcom Brand Guidelines: Thrane & Thrane, SAILOR and Sea Tel Under One Danish Name

Two Danish lines and an American antenna maker.

Cobham Satcom is the satellite and radio communications company of Kongens Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, and its history runs through three older names. The company says the first is SAILOR, the marine radio brand that S.P. Radio of Aalborg began making in the 1950s. The second is Sea Tel, founded in 1978 in Concord, California, to build stabilised antenna systems for satellite communications at sea. The third, and the one the company calls its official origin, is Thrane & Thrane, formed on 29 September 1981 by the brothers Lars and Per Thrane and based in the Copenhagen area.

Thrane & Thrane built its business on terminals for Inmarsat, the maritime satellite organisation set up in 1979; the company says its Inmarsat-C terminals of the 1980s became the foundation of its maritime work. It then bought its way to a wider range. According to the company, it acquired EuroCom Industries, the Danish owner of the SAILOR brand, in 2004, and the mobile satellite business of the Norwegian company Nera in 2006. Sea Tel, meanwhile, had been bought in 2003 by Cobham plc, the British aerospace group based in Bournemouth.

In 2012 the two lines met. SatNews reported on 3 May 2012 that Cobham had reached agreement with the Thrane & Thrane board on a revised tender offer, which the board undertook to recommend to shareholders. English Wikipedia says the acquisition took place in June 2012 and made Thrane & Thrane the core of a new Cobham SATCOM business unit alongside Sea Tel marine antennas, TracStar land terminals and Omnipless airborne products. The company says the combined business was rebranded Cobham Satcom in 2013, with its headquarters in Denmark.

SAILOR, Sea Tel, EXPLORER and TRACKER.

Cobham Satcom sells under product brands rather than under one model line. In a December 2025 announcement it named four: SAILOR, Sea Tel, EXPLORER and TRACKER. SAILOR is the maritime radio and satellite terminal brand, including equipment for the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, or GMDSS; Sea Tel is the stabilised maritime antenna brand for VSAT and satellite television. The company’s 2013 milestone also lists AVIATOR, an airborne line, among the brands brought together that year.

Two recent launches show the range. In July 2024 SatNews described the Sea Tel 370s TV, a 3.7-metre satellite television antenna designed mainly for cruise ships and large yachts, which switches automatically between circular and linear polarisation in the C-band and is built on the newest generation of Sea Tel’s IMA electronics platform, already used in the company’s marine VSAT antennas; the company also offered a feed upgrade for existing Sea Tel 2.4-metre and 3.7-metre television antennas. In May 2026 the company announced the SAILOR 7200, a GMDSS terminal for Iridium Certus that combines GMDSS with ship reporting functions in one unit and a small omnidirectional antenna, shown at the Posidonia exhibition in Athens; it said the SAILOR mini-C remains available for Inmarsat services. On the VSAT side, the company said in November 2025 that “K” Line RoRo Bulk Ship Management of Kobe had chosen its 1-metre SAILOR XTR GX-R2 antenna, built for Inmarsat’s maritime services, for more than 100 roll-on/roll-off and bulk vessels as they move to Inmarsat’s NexusWave service, with installation continuing over two years.

The company gives its own scale figures. It says more than 300,000 SAILOR maritime L-band antennas have been deployed worldwide, and that its involvement in maritime satellite communications goes back to the founding of Inmarsat in 1979. Its about page counts more than 70 years of experience in radio and satellite, a span that reaches back to the first SAILOR radios of the 1950s.

Design and documentation.

Marine electronics and satellite-communications companies tend to present themselves through their equipment first. Their websites lead with product photographs of radars, chartplotters, sonar displays, antennas and satellite terminals, usually shown on a plain background or mounted on a mast, a wheelhouse roof or a radar arch. Domes and displays are shot from the same few angles so that a whole range reads as one family, and model names, sizes and frequency bands do much of the descriptive work.

Coverage is the second recurring image. Satellite-service providers and antenna makers publish coverage maps for each network or plan, from regional cellular zones to global satellite beams, and many now show several networks side by side as low-orbit services join older geostationary ones. Bridge and wheelhouse photography carries the human side: officers at consoles, screens glowing in a dark bridge, yachts at anchor, fishing boats and offshore vessels at work.

Airtime and connectivity plans are a large part of how these companies describe themselves. Data allowances, subscription terms, crew-internet packages and backup services are laid out in plan tables, named and grouped the way each company chooses, and a hardware maker may sell plans on its own network next to those of other operators. Network-management software, cyber security services and content for crews increasingly sit alongside the hardware.

Partner pages complete the picture. Dealer and installer networks, service points in ports, and the satellite operators and equipment makers a company works with are listed with their own names and marks. This guide describes each company’s identity from dated sources and the company’s own pages, and the colours and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations rather than reproductions of any mark.

A British name on a Danish company.

The Cobham name has outlasted Cobham’s ownership. The American private equity firm Advent International completed its takeover of Cobham plc on 17 January 2020, English Wikipedia says, and the company says Cobham Satcom then became a standalone business. In April 2025 Cobham Group signed an agreement to sell Cobham Satcom to Solix Group, subject to regulatory approvals, SatNews reported; the company now describes Solix as a Scandinavian investment company and says Cobham Satcom became part of it in 2025, while SatNews referred in December 2025 to the Solix acquisition as done. Christophe Duret is chief executive.

The company is still reshaping. On 8 December 2025 Cobham Satcom and Gatehouse Satcom announced a merger of Gatehouse with Cobham Satcom’s Network Division, to form a subsidiary in which Cobham Satcom would hold the majority, focused on 5G non-terrestrial network software and ground infrastructure. Gatehouse’s chief executive, Kenney Schmidt Christiansen, was named to lead the new company. When announced, the deal was subject to customary regulatory approvals. SatNews noted that the two companies had both been founding members of the Space Connect North industry cluster in January 2025. Cobham Satcom said it would keep serving its maritime and enterprise markets through its product brands.

For a design guide, Cobham Satcom shows how a company built from acquisitions can keep older product names, SAILOR and Sea Tel among them, as the names seen on board while the corporate name changes hands. Compare Inmarsat, the network its first terminals were built for, and Iridium, the network behind its newest GMDSS terminal. For this guide we use a slate grey, a harbour teal and a brass accent with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cobham Satcom’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.