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Under an agreement worth A$75 M BAE Systems Australia has been awarded a contract to provide strategically important elements of the Advanced Satellite Communications Terrestrial Infrastructure System (ASTIS) within the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF’s) Military Satellite Communications Programme JP2008. The company, working in conjunction with partners Astrium, Sinclair Knight...

Economic downturn and inventory building have produced manufacturers in the highly competitive discrete power semiconductor market who are severely restrained by low prices and will continue to face difficulty in generating sustainable profits. A new analysis from Frost and Sullivan, “World Discrete Power Semiconductor Markets,” reveals that revenues in...

A breakthrough in Ka-band SSPA power is available for commercial and military applications. The Sophia Wireless model MPC4-2531 solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) provides 27 W of saturated power at 30 GHz and wideband coverage of 24 to 27 W at P3dB over 25 to 31 GHz. Linear performance is...

Communications services such as mobile phone and wireless LAN have increased the use of multi-bands while the terminals are becoming smaller. These trends have led to the widespread use of RF modules combining multiple functions. Along with this trend is the ability to make increasingly complex measurements more efficient....

A new family of low profile, high performance couplers has been introduced in a new easy-to-use, manufacturing friendly surface-mount package. These new couplers feature lower insertion loss, better phase balance, less amplitude imbalance, and higher isolation and directivity than previous offerings in this area. The new parts are much...

A new printed circuit board material has been developed to meet the demanding requirements for dielectric constant temperature stability and plated hole reliability for high temperature and varying environmental conditions. TSM-30 is based on a high temperature, low loss organic combined with ceramic. The material exhibits superior low loss,...

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS)-based products run from the mundane of automobile air-bag sensors to the over-hyped optical switching fabrics of the recent telecommunications bubble. For some time now, design engineers have been waiting for the advantages of MEMS fabrication techniques to be successfully applied to the problem of RF and...

Development speed is a major concern in today's products' life cycle. Ranking alongside the raw costs involved with prototyping a device, time-to-market is the one key constraint imposed on design engineers. Consequently, any innovative or competitive advantage can easily be lost if advanced ideas get stuck in a long...

A series of high performance wideband MMIC low noise, gain block and driver amplifiers has been developed for applications in next-generation radar and satcom equipment. These new amplifiers operate in the 2 to 20 GHz frequency range and feature a single-supply, low noise and distributed gain functionality. The amplifiers...

A high speed receiver and beam controller has been introduced to address the growing need for faster antenna measurements. This article describes the Panther 6000 system and will show how it can benefit the antenna range operator by allowing more complex CW and pulsed antennas to be tested in...