Michael Porcelain
Analyst · NOBLE Capital
Thanks. Given all the news headlines about the coronavirus, I'm quite proud of our Q2 performance. But given the large attention in the press, we wanted to provide some color on the impact to Comtech and how we are looking at the situation.
First, we do believe such business conditions are temporary, and they will significantly improve from the current state during the second half of our fiscal 2020. Second, to date, the largest business impact we have felt is in our satellite ground station technology product line. Here, we've been impacted by travel restrictions imposed by certain countries as well as by our customers. From what we see, a large majority of companies are restricting foreign travel, site visits to facilities and some of our customers are not even attending trade shows. Thus, although we do not believe we permanently lost any orders, no one is around to sign them or even take deliveries.
To date, parts availability in our supply chain has not been materially impacted. We source our products from many global suppliers, and we generally keep stock inventory on hand. Thus, our belief is that when order flow resumes, we will be able to quickly turn back on factory production and deliver products that are in our backlog. Although there remains significant uncertainty on when business conditions will return to normal, we are expecting such to occur in the second half of fiscal 2020.
Now let me give you some color by segment of our Q2 performance. In our Commercial Solutions segment, it was a solid quarter. Net sales were $96.1 million compared to $86.7 million last year, an increase of 10.8%. Bookings in this segment were $98.9 million for the quarter, resulting in a book-to-bill ratio of 1.03. Our Heights Solutions continued to gain traction. For example, our Heights Networking Platform was recently selected by a major maritime service provider in Asia as the best fit for demanding maritime applications.
During the most recent fiscal quarter, we were also awarded a contract valued at more than $8.8 million for Ka-band solid-state amplifiers to be used in an in-flight connectivity SATCOM application. This end application is in the military side, where we believe there will be future opportunities. Broadly, as we have said before, based on the anticipated increase in the number of satellites, both high throughput or HTS and LEO satellites expected to be launched, we believe that we are in the early stages of a multiyear period of growing demand for our products.
During the second half of our fiscal 2020, we expect deliveries to increase on previously received $20 million order for Ka and V-Band TWTAs to support the new Jupiter high-speed satellite network.
As discussed on prior conference calls, given the increasing need to backhaul cellular traffic across remote areas around the world, we made a strategic decision to expand our satellite ground station technology product line with the pending acquisitions of UHP and Gilat. As a reminder, UHP Networks is a leading provider of innovative and disruptive satellite ground station technologies based in Canada and in Moscow. We are currently waiting for final approval from the Russian government to close this transaction, which will -- we hope will occur this year.
As announced in January 29, 2020, we are also excited about our pending acquisition of Gilat, a worldwide leader in satellite networking technology solutions and services, with a strong presence in the satellite ground station and in-flight connectivity markets and deep expertise in operating large network infrastructures.
The acquisition of Gilat offers many strategic benefits. First, the acquisition will drive Comtech's global market access by creating the world leader with combined annual pro forma sales approaching nearly $1 billion. Second, it will strengthen our position as a leading supplier of advanced communication solutions. We believe we'll be uniquely capable of servicing the expanding need for ground infrastructure to support both existing and emerging satellite networks. Third, the acquisition will greatly expand our product portfolio with highly complementary technologies, including Gilat's high-performance TDMA-based satellite modems and Gilat's next-generation solid-state amplifiers. But also considering our current products and UHP's product line, we believe we will have a broad range of products to meet our customers more complicated needs in the future. Fourth, the acquisition will broaden our leadership position in the rapidly growing in-flight connectivity and cellular backhaul markets, which are expected to expand, given the availability of lower cost bandwidth and the adoption of satellite technologies into the 5G cellular backhaul ecosystem. Fifth, the acquisition will bolster our world-class research and development capabilities, enabling Comtech to offer customers more complete end-to-end technology solutions. Sixth, we believe the acquisition will allow us to accelerate shareholder value creation by contributing to our ongoing strategy to move towards higher-margin solutions and by increasing customer diversification geographically and by market.
We are very excited about the growth that we expect from these pending acquisitions. And overall, we believe that this product line will grow from current levels over the next several years.
Now let me turn to our Public Safety and Location Technologies product lines who's sale -- who's second quarter of fiscal 2020 sales in aggregate were significantly higher as compared to the second quarter of fiscal 2019. Here, fiscal 2020 is shaping up to look like a terrific year. Our fiscal 2020 is definitively benefiting from our fiscal 2019 acquisitions, in particular, customer reaction to our Solacom acquisition remains very positive. For example, we just recently announced that Solacom won a contract worth $6.6 million to upgrade a Next Generation 911 system for a New England state.
Also in November 2019, we announced that Solacom will be -- will provide call handling systems and solutions as the initial answering point for the entire country of Australia. Today, Solacom has been deployed around Australia and is expected to handle more than 8.9 million emergency telephone calls that are made there each year.
During fiscal 2020, we expect to enable [ our ] version of Advanced Mobile Location or AML technology in Australia. This will enable emergency services personnel to more accurately pinpoint the location of people calling from mobile devices. For those of you familiar with companies like RapidSOS, in simple terms, this is our version of it and we have big plans for it. In the future, we will roll out multimedia contract options for messaging and video calling. Over time, we will be able to leverage these technologies to our existing customers and to new customers, both in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.
With all of the exciting news relating to the acquisitions of UHP and Gilat that we have been talking about, I simply do not want anyone to forget about the success that we are having in our Public Safety business. As we marked the 1-year anniversary of the acquisition, Solacom is certainly a success. We are on track to meeting our objectives, and we have started to cross-market the Solacom technology to several legacy customers who are using older technologies. With the acquisition of Solacom and the GD 911 business, Comtech has emerged as one of the largest Next Generation 911 contract holders in the United States.
Additionally, we have a number of large opportunities pending relating to upgrades to Next Generation 911 systems. Our public safety product lines have yet to be impacted by any negative impact from the coronavirus and we are in active negotiations with 2 large public safety agencies for large, multiyear and multimillion dollar Next Generation 911 contracts. And we hope that these contracts will be awarded soon to us. These potential contract awards were years in the making, and we are very optimistic that we will receive them soon.
Looking forward, we have a strong base of backlog and other opportunities, and end market conditions, while competitive, remain healthy. All in all, given the product leadership strengths we have in our Commercial Solutions segment and the benefit of our recent acquisitions, we are optimistic that this segment will grow for many years ahead.
Now let me turn to our Government Solutions segment. Net sales here were $65.5 million in Q2 of fiscal '20 as compared to $77.4 million in Q2 of last year. Net sales of our Mission-Critical Technologies were lower due to lower net sales of satellite-based space components, antennas and high-reliability Electric, Electronic and Electromechanical, or EEE parts, as well as the absence of sales during the most recent period related to MT-2025 mobile satellite transceivers for the BFT-2 program.
Net sales of our High-Performance Transmission Technologies during this quarter were higher than the 3 months last year, driven by increased sales of our solid-state high-power amplifiers and related switching technologies. Bookings in this segment for Q2 came in at $52.7 million. In this segment, we did receive our first order for the U.S. Marine troposcatter program, and we expect to receive additional orders in 2021 for this multiyear program.
Although this segment was not impacted by the coronavirus, we did experience some order delays and shifts for equipment to be used by the U.S. Army. Some of these orders shifted into fiscal '21 and some from Q3 into Q4. As everyone knows, period-to-period fluctuations in bookings are normal for this segment. Although we do have a bit of a lull in U.S. government orders at the moment, I do want to remind everyone that we do not report orders or bookings until we receive actual funded orders from our customers. For example, bookings this quarter do not reflect the full amount of orders expected from a large U.S. Army global field support contract that we won or the full amount of orders for the troposcatter equipment for end-use by the U.S. Marine.
As previously announced in October 2019, we were awarded a contract with $98.6 million ceiling from the U.S. Army, which calls for our Mission-Critical Technology product line to provide global field support for military satellite communication for SATCOM terminals around the world. This field support contract covers diverse engineering and technical skills to support these SATCOM terminals, including logistics, help desk, network engineering, security engineering, RF and other types of support.
Through January 2020, the contract has been funded at only $24.4 million, with additional funding expected to occur later this year. As our U.S. Marine troposcatter contract gets off the ground, we would expect our prime contractor customer to place more orders to support the U.S. Marine's target of fielding a total of 172 units. As discussed on our last conference call, we believe this multiyear opportunity validates Comtech's market-leading troposcatter technologies and expertise and bodes well for the future as we continue to see strong demand for these products.
Now let me turn it back to Fred, who will provide some closing remarks.