Anatech Electronics Newsletter - September 2013

Anatech Electronics has published its September 2013 newsletter. As always, it includes both company news and some tidbits about relevant industry events, regulations, and standards. This month Sam Benzacar writes about Wi-Fi encryption, the Land Mobile market, and a new study by the FCC on radio interference. He also has a short piece titled, "And They Said Someday We Wouldn't Need Filters" (BTW, Anatech makes filters).

Why Encrypt Your Wi-Fi? See Below

U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled that Google wrongly captured data transmitted over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, including emails, user names, passwords, images, and documents as its vehicles drove down their streets in more than 30 countries shooting photos for Google Street View between 2008 and 2010. The judge ruled that this violated wiretap laws. Google had argued that their activities were exempt because data transmitted over a Wi-Fi network is a radio communication and is readily accessible to the public.

The decision is the first to state that it is illegal for a company to collect private information from Wi-Fi networks that provide Internet service to people at home. A German data protection commissioner discovered what Google was doing in 2010 and shortly thereafter, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that "In short, let me just say that we screwed up."

Land Mobile Market
Poised for Growth

The global land mobile radio system market will have a compound annual growth rate of 11.7% through 2016, according to analyst firm TechNavio, which noted that business users increasingly demand radios that support both traditional land mobile and LTE technologies. The leading vendors are Cassidian (owned by EADS), Harris, Motorola Solutions, Raytheon, and Thales.

New FCC Interference
Study Available

The FCC has released OET-69 TVStudy Rev. 1.27 software for use by television broadcasters to estimate and avoid station interference after the incentive auctions in 2014. The new version adds the ability to predict and analyze cross-border interference to ensure stations will not be placed on the same channel in adjacent markets. The previous version was criticized for its inaccuracy and bugs. It can simultaneously generate multiple station signals to depict a composite of national coverage. Users can analyze interference between U.S., Canadian and Mexican stations using “proxy” channels. For more information, click here.

A Message from Sam Benzacar

And They Said Someday We Wouldn't Need Filters

By Sam Benzacar

Every RF and microwave designer gets great pleasure from reducing the number of circuit components while either retaining or increasing performance. Filters have always been at or near the top of the list. After all, they take up space and eliminate interference, which ideally shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Eliminating SAW filters in “wireless-enabled” devices for example, from the lowliest feature phone to the fastest smartphone or tablet, would free-up space that could be used for other things that are useful to the user – and beneficial to the manufacturer. So for years, papers have been written that there will come a time when digital technology will eliminate filters from the bill of materials.

Instead, just the opposite has happened: There is a greater need for filters today than ever before--and not just in smartphones, for a variety of reasons, some obvious, some not. A current smartphone designed to be used internationally must operate in an incredible number of bands, making interference inevitable if there were no bandpass filters and duplexers to keep things under control.

Base stations, from macro to femto, present challenges as well but at higher or much higher power levels, which is why there are, and will continue to be, cavity or other types of bandpass filters in each one. And as wireless carriers continually tell the FCC, they need more spectrum since what they have soon won’t accommodate the huge amounts of traffic generated by everyone streaming video. It’s bad enough now, but when LTE Advanced arrives, the problem will become even worse.

The answer is to either “find” new spectrum or share it, as we pointed out in our July issue, or shoehorn new wireless bands in between other services. Either way, interference will be an issue to be reckoned with. There are plenty of other examples beyond the wireless industry as well.

Which is all the more reason why you should contact Anatech Electronics for your filter needs. We’ve been designing and manufacturing filters and filter-based products for commercial and military applications for more than 22 years, and we continue to solve the most challenging interference problems.

Please contact us at (973) 772-4242 or by e-mail at sales@anatechelectronics.com.

We Want Your Opinion

Everyone needs to know more about technology, and while filters may seem simple, they're not. So we'd like to hear from you about what topics we should cover in the future as we continue to build our Technical Resources section.

We would very much appreciate it if you would take a minute to send us an e-mail simply stating a technical issue you would like to know more about. You'll not only help yourself, but no doubt others as well.

Thanks in advance!

Sam Benzacar

Just click here to let us know. All responses are confidential.

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[borders/inc-300x250.htm]About Anatech Electronics;
Anatech Electronics, Inc. (AEI) specializes in the design and manufacture of standard and custom RF and microwave filters and other passive components and subsystems employed in commercial, industrial, and aerospace and applications. Products are available from an operating frequency range of 10 kHz to 30 GHz and include cavity, ceramic, crystal, LC, and surface acoustic wave (SAW), as well as power combiners/dividers, duplexers and diplexers, directional couplers, terminations, attenuators, circulators, EMI filters, and lightning arrestors. The company’s custom products and capabilities are available at www.anatechelectronics.com and standard products are available for purchase at the Anatech Electronics Web store, AMCrf.com.

Contact:

Anatech Electronics, Inc.
70 Outwater Lane
Garfield, NJ 07026
(201) 772-4242
sales@anatechelectronics.com

Posted 5/17/2013

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