To support application demonstrations in remote locations, NREN uses a combination of satellite and terrestrial links, including a portable satellite dish which is taken to remote sites. The satellite downlink is located at NASA Glenn Research Center, and the terrestrial NREN wide area network (WAN) is used to reach scientists and engineers at their home sites.

NREN's portable satellite dish is part of the NREN Transportable Earth Station (TES), which was developed in 2001. This facility consists of a trailer equipped with a twelve-foot satellite antenna and supporting electronics, along with a van to pull the trailer. The TES can be driven to a site, parked, the antenna deployed, and the system used for satellite access to provide temporary networking facilities at that site. During the past five years the TES has been used to successfully support several NASA mission application demonstrations. For example, in April of 2003 the TES supported an Earth Science ground-truthing experiment in the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. The purpose of the experiment was to enable near-real-time validation and calibration of satellite data by providing geologists located at the remote site interactive access to NASA computational and storage facilities. A combination of networking technologies provided the necessary communications infrastructure. A wireless local area network provided communications capabilities at the field site, the TES provided satellite connectivity between the field site and NASA centers, and the NREN WAN testbed provided terrestrial connectivity between the NASA centers.