Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1503357
12 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2023 signals from each one of those combined and through soware and then get an antenna. e largest one so far has a 242-transmitter array on one side and a 242-receiver array on the other side. Who are the typical customers for this sort of thing? As you can expect, there are some big players in this market. ere is still a great push to get satellite access more transportable and smaller. Some customers are looking at it from a com- mercial standpoint, like the trucking or the airline industry. It's just a portable antenna for wherever you might need it; you can open up a case, lay it on the ground or just take it out, mount it on a truck or whatever. e whole antenna structure is about 40" x 30". ey are also developing smaller arrays for specific applications. It's interesting when you start working with 4-mil spaces and other small features. I always tell everybody that my favorite button is Zoom, but it's relative to whatever space you have to work with, and when you see a board that's 40" x 30"—wow, that's a pretty big element. But it's been very interesting, and the tech- nology has really changed. We have some good board shops that we're working with, and they're willing to push the envelope in a niche market. It has opened my eyes over the last couple of years about what can be done in a cir- cuit board environment, as opposed to limita- tions you are put on by an average board shop. We're not even looking at multiples of two layers of boards. Some of these are 11-layer and 15-layer boards. We're using a lot of special materials. As I was saying, we just finished one module that's about the size of a cellphone. It has low-noise amplifier stages with printed fil- ters and combiners on internal layers. We just basically kept stitching back and forth while adding layers until we got all the elements we needed and came out the other end. It's more a matter of what you need, and not the limita- tions of a normal board. You mentioned that you're doing more of this RF work than ever before. Yes. I worked for 20 years for Scientific Atlanta, a leader of satellite communication, doing a lot of RF front ends, couplers, filters, and other printed elements; that was what I did. I've been self-employed now for almost 22 years and I was primarily doing digital, power sup- plies, etc. Somebody reached out to me a while ago and said, "Hey, can you do this?" I said, "Yes, I can." So, I started working with them, and then their board shop turned me on to a couple of others. Now probably 70% of my current work is high-frequency antenna microwave circuits. My clients are really pushing the envelope, if there actually is one. How do you determine whether you should design your own antenna or buy a COTS antenna? Where do you draw the line? From what I know, the thing with COTS is that they're generally made for a specific applica- tion frequency range and have integration limi- tations. If you're trying to pinpoint your appli- Albert Gaines