EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS - A BRIEF HISTORY

PRESENTED BY RICHARD U. LAINE, PE P R I N C I PA L E N G I N E E R , AV I AT N E T W O R K S , S A N TA C L A R A , C A 9 5 0 5 4

JULY 2011
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Agenda
Historical Perspective, not without controversy Wireless in its Infancythe Intertwining of Edison, Marconi, and

Tesla

Propagationthe Intertwining of Huygens, Newton, Fresnel, and

Einstein

Microwave RadiosThe Early Days: PPM digital, Analog FM-FDM Evolution of the U.S. Microwave Communications Industry Evolution to Aviat Networks Upgrade from Analog to Digital Microwave Hops Digital Microwave AttributesA Media Comparison

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Wireless Communications The Early Days

Excerpt from the Scientific American July 1892 In the specification to one of his recent patents, Thomas A. Edison says:

I have discovered that if sufficient elevation be obtained to overcome the curvature of the earths surface and to reduce to the minimum the earths absorption, electric signaling between distant points can be carried on by induction without the use of wires.
MICROWAVE PATH ENGINEERING 117 YEARS AGO!

Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931)Ohio

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

The First Wireless Communications Age

The radio is one hundred years old, but it doesnt look it!

... it is interesting to note that Samuel F. B. Morses telegraph was followed only 40 years later by the increasingly remarkable invention of radio frequency transmission. Thomas Edison experimented with signals that could be generated and detected at a distance in 1883, but did not appreciate the importance of the Edison Effect. Edison received a patent for wireless telegraphy in 1885, but was preoccupied with other projects. Edison sold the patent for a song to Marconi, who put extensive effort into the technology. By 1901, he sent Morse Code from Massachusetts to Cornwall, England.
Roger Rusch Applied Microwave & Wireless Fall 1995

Samuel F. B. Morse (1791 1872) Scotland

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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Wireless Marconi Inventor of the Radio?

January 1897
An invention which promises to be of the greatest practical value in the world of telegraphy has received its first public announcement at the hands of Mr. William H. Preece, the telegraphic expert of the London post office. During a lecture on "Telegraphy Without Wires" recently delivered in London, Mr. Preece introduced a young Italian, a Mr. Marconi, who, he said, had recently come to him with such a system. Telegraphing without wires was, of course, no new idea. In 1893, telegrams were transmitted a distance of three miles across the Bristol Channel by induction. Young Marconi solved the problem on different principles, and post office officials had made a successful test on Salisbury Plain at a distance of three-quarters of a mile. Scientific American - January 1897 The roots of modern radio-links can be perceived in the first experiments carried out by Marconi, as he used very high frequenciespractically in the field of microwavesand had recourse to parabolic-cylinder reflectors. Here is the first invention which Marconi anticipated. Many scientists before Marconi had devoted their work to the electric and magnetic phenomena, taking advantage of the extraordinary synthesis which James Clerk Maxwells equations had given them. In 1894, when he was only twenty, the young man from Bologna set up his first laboratory at Villa Griffone, about fourteen kilometers from his native city. Marconis basic contribution, for which he deserves the name of inventor of the radio, was, first of all, that he modulated by a signal the electromagnetic waves that a spark produced in a Hertz oscillator sent in space. Gian Carlo Corazza 1996 European Conference for Radio-Relay, Bologna
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Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) Italy 1909 Nobel Prize for Wireless Telegraphy

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) Scotland

Wireless Marconi Inventor of the Radio? Or Not!!

On 11 June 1943, the U.S Supreme Court overturned most of Marconis wireless communications patents thus upholding Nikola Teslas earlier September 1897 patent for radio, that in 1904 was reversed by the U.S. Patent Office and awarded to Marconi, based upon Teslas wireless communication demonstrations in 1894. This Supreme Court decisionfive months after he died impoverished, alone in a New York hotel roomin effect recognized Tesla (who, shortly after arriving in the U.S. in 1884, had worked for Thomas Edison for $18 per week) as the inventor of the radio. This added to Teslas remarkable credentials as the inventor and architect of alternating current machinery and long-distance electrical distribution, this rendering obsolete his adversary Edisons direct current electrical powerhouses that had been built up and down the Atlantic seaboard.
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) Austrian Empire The Man who Invented the 20th Century

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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Propagation Huygens Principle? Or Not!!

Christiaan Huygens, a contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton, is said to have gained most of his insights into wave motion by observing waves in a canal. In 1678, this great Dutch physicist wrote the treatise Traite de la Lumiere on the wave theory of light, and in this work he stated that the wavefront of a propagating wave of light at any instant conforms to the envelope of spherical wavelets (Huygens Combination Wavefront of separate waves) emanating from every point on the wavefront at the prior instant, with the understanding that the wavelets have the same speed as the overall wave.

Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) - Netherlands

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) - England

Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788-1827) - France

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) - Germany

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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Propagation Huygens Principle? Or Not!!

An illustration of this idea, now known as Huygens' Principle, is shown. Disbelieving, Newton continued to push his Corpuscular Theory of particle propagation of light, so because of that it was not until some 100 years later when Augustin-Jean Fresnel of Fresnel lens and Fresnel zone fame revisited Huygens Principle in 1815 that his term diffraction was reintroduced.* Illustration of Huygens Principle. The pinholes in the mask act as secondary point sources of radio energy. Einstein and others opine the duality that light functions as both a particle (per Newton) and a wave (per Huygens) depending on how the experiment is conducted and when observations are made.

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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Microwave Radio Links - The Early Days

2 GHz PPM Digital Radios 6 Bays!! 24xVF or 24x300 baud data channel capacity!! General Electrics 2 GHz radar-like pulse position modulated (PPM, used during WW2 then declassified) hot standby terminal. Many hundreds of similar GE and ITT PPM radio hops were deployed in long pipeline, power and turnpike systems in the 1940s-50s, some up to 75 hops in length with no end-toend noise buildup (like modern digital systems), all over the U.S. and worldwide for the military.

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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Microwave Radio Links - The Early Days

AT&T Long-Haul Analog Routes Deployed 35,000 TD2 Repeaters The San Francisco-New York transcontinental route of hundreds of 4 GHz TD2 analog FM-FDM hops completed in 1951 for all long distance VF and TV was upgraded with high-capacity L6 GHz TH1 radios in 1955 and improved TD3 radios in 1962. The performance of analog hops was far more affected than later generation digital radio hops to equipment nonlinearities, interference, thermal noise, multipath distortion, waveguide echoes and moding, and fading.

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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U.S. Microwave Industry Evolution Through 1991

The Early Days U.S. Microwave Communications Manufacturers from 1931 (ITT) through 1991 Farinon/Harris MCD (1958) and DMC/Stratex Networks (1984) merged to form Aviat Networks (2010)

50
(growing rapidly)

EXTINCT

Harris Stratex Networks (2007), which changed names to

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EXTANT

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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How We Evolved into Aviat Networks

Kurt Appert*
1944 San Francisco 1947 San Carlos, CA

Len Erickson Bill Farinon

Feb 1958 San Carlos 1980 Merger Jan 1984 San Jose

Lenkurt Electric Company

1959 Merger

Bill Gibson ( )

1963 1981 1982

GTE Network Systems

1998

Jan 26, 2007 Merger 2002

1983 Siemens Transmission Systems

Microwave Communications Division (MCD) 2010

1984

Boca Raton

Siemens Information and Communications Networks

* Bancroft Library Oral history: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=kurt%20appert

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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The Migration from Analog to Digital Microwave Links

Its Been a Challenge!
Canadian Marconi delivered the first PCM digital radios to private

microwave users in North America in 1970, some hops remaining in service into the millennium, thus triggering the rapid development and deployment of higher capacity (first 1152 VF ch/78 Mbit/s, then 1344 VF ch/90 Mbit/s) digital radios for LOS (line-of-sight) radio-relay hops.
This culminated in 1980 with the realization that the alarm/network

management systems and adaptive equalization in these trailblazing digital radios were often found totally inadequate to accommodate the fragile, bursty characteristics of many high capacity digital microwave radios and spectral distortion caused by dispersive fading in hops not before seen in FM-FDM analog radio systems.

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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The Migration from Analog to Digital Microwave Links

Its Been a Challenge!
The 1980s thus brought about dramatic improvements in digital

microwave modulation efficiencies and, with new adaptive equalization and powerful error correction, robustness to the dispersive (spectrumdistorting) fade activity that so degraded digital radio hop performance in the 1970s.
The mid-1990s heralded DSP equalizers that replaced discrete devices

in far more robust advanced asynchronous (PDH) and 2016/1890 ch SONET/SDH point-to-point TDM digital radios. The FCCs relocation of analog microwave hops from 2 GHz in the late 1990s to accommodate cellular deployment sped this digital migration.
These new PDH and SDH digital technologies supported the explosive

birth of new high-performance terrestrial Fixed Wireless Systems and Fixed Wireless Access networks in all of their forms, e.g. Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint, in synergism with fiber optics and FSO (freespace optical) networks.
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Digital Microwave Attributes - a Media Comparison

Superior availability (uptime) route security (no fiber optics cable cuts) Rapidly expandable and upgradeable, in-service if protected
Turn-Up Time
Long

Favors Fiber
Microwave or Fiber

High qualityno multihop noise addition as in analog microwave hops Rapid deployment over difficult terrain and into urban areas, unlike cable Economical and secureno copper or fiber optic cable deployment with

right-of-way and security issues, and very high costs

Robust to fading and interference compared to analog microwave hops Much less sensitive to antenna feeder system and long-delayed ,on-path

Favors Microwave
Short Low

Transport Choices
High Fiber

Required Transport Capacity Radio

echoes compared to analog microwave hops

Highly efficient data and broadband transport Exacting in-service visibility of radio hop performance with NMS, PCR Seamless interconnectivity to an ever-expanding digital transport (fiber
Availability/security Payload (transport) Cost effectiveness Implementation time Terrain considerations

optics and other), PABX/MSC switch, and LAN/IP world

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011