As the market trends toward more commercial UAVs, so does AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems show as it rebrands itself next year as Xponential. The renaming is meant to reflect the “Innovative and Expanding Industry“ as the event has grown over the years to about 600 exhibitors and 8,000 attendees very similar in size to IMS. This year saw an expansion of parts and services in the UAV sector such as 3D printing and composite materials. The event has everything from engines and props to sensors and complete UAV systems. While there was a notable shift this year to commercial UAVs, there is still significant military content with the primes such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and others attending. View our photo gallery here.
For RF and microwave companies, we have traditionally seen companies that produce cables/connectors, antennas, filters and amplifiers in the exhibition but there seemed to be fewer this year as the commercial content has increased, which is less appealing to high performance products. Browsing the exhibition for the RF and microwave companies, here is what we found:
Antcom’s antennas are used in many types of unmanned systems including search and rescue, border patrol, public safety, military, aerospace, agriculture, geodesy and survey, mapping, seismology, firefighting, remote monitoring, exploration, offshore and deep-sea, and more. They were featuring a wide range of GPS/GNSS, and video-datalink antennas for civilian and military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), unmanned ground vehicles (UGV), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) and unmanned surface vehicles (USV).
ADI/Hittite was featuring a Ka-Band upconverter with an HPA that has an input frequency range from 1-2 GHz and output frequency range from 29-31 GHz and conversion gain of 65 dB. They also had an impressive, lightweight 2-18 GHz 50 W amplifier with noise figure of 5 dB typical. The power sequencing, remote inhibit and a TTL level power supply state monitor are also included.
Cobham was present showing everything from components to sub-systems to system level solutions. They were featuring several products including their Aviator S Series of broadband products for the connected aircraft. The systems consist of a subset of a HLD/enhanced low gain antenna, compact satellite data unit and multi-channel HPA. Everything is optimized for a smaller, lighter and cost effective solution.
CPI’s antenna systems division was displaying their dual axis directional antenna with 23 dBi gain, slotted waveguide array and flexible control interfaces. They also had a quad band on-the-move antenna (L-, S-, C- and Ku-Band) that is bi-directional in all bands, RSSI for rapid signal location and acquisition and built-in RF electronics.
Delcross was showing off a new release (version 4.0) of EMIT that provides an advance in cosite interference modeling and simulation, providing speed, data management, multi-fidelity models and diagnostic tools necessary for the rapid identification and mitigation of interference in harsh RF environments. With EMIT’s newly optimized solver engine, analyzing realistic multi-system scenarios over a frequency range wide enough to include all in-band and out-of-band interference effects (including intermodulation due to non-linear phenomenon) can easily be accomplished on a modest laptop computer.
Haigh-Farr’s blade antenna line was originally introduced in the early ‘70s. With over 40,000 of these antennas produced, their new model continues in this tradition with an extended bandwidth design. It operates from 2200 – 5850 MHz with VSWR <1.6:1 (typical) and 2.1:1 max over operating bands with 30 W average power. They make all types of antennas from buttons to wrap around antennas.
Insulated Wire (IW) had a new catalog available as they serve a broad range of both military and commercial markets. These include telecommunications, data links, satellite systems, airborne electronic warfare and counter measures, missile systems, UAV applications, avionics and instrumentation, fire control systems, medical electronics, and geophysical exploration. All cable assemblies are built to customer specifications using advanced equipment and procedures including IPC-WHMA-A-620 trained technicians for solder processes. All assemblies are tested for VSWR and insertion performance before leaving the factory. Phase matching, amplitude matching, and time delay measurements up to 67 GHz are available when required.
Mercury was displaying their ruggedized digital RF memory for pods, UAVs, aircraft and other platforms. It has up to 1.2 GHz of bandwidth, output attenuation control and is light weight. They have designed more than 45 different models of DRFM and fielded well over 600 units. They also had on hand their miniature electronic support measures system with RF coverage of 100 to 1100 MHz, search rate of 19 GHz/sec retune rate, search signal capacity of great than 250 up/down events per sec and 300 signals simultaneously tracked. It has end-to-end noise figure of 5-8 dB, end-to-end SFDR (25 kHz BW) is 65 dB.
Reactel was showing their miniature filters, multiplexers and multifunction assemblies that perform up to 50 GHz. Some of their more compact filters include discrete components from 2 kHz to 5 GHz with bandwidths up to 150% and size as small as .25" x .3" x .5". Ceramic filters from 300 MHz to 6 GHz, cavity filters from 500 MHz to 40 GHz, combline and interdigital from 500 MHz to 40 GHz and flat pack from 5 to 50 GHz. Also available are waveguide, tubular and suspended substrate filters/multiplexers plus multifunction assemblies such as switched filter banks, amplified filters and diplexers and iso-filters.
RT Logic had a suite of products that capture, transport and regenerate real-time RF spectrum over any distance using existing IP networks. Their SpectralNet eliminates the physical distance limitations in RF signal distribution, enabling the optimization of ground infrastructure to improve flexibility, reliability and reduce costs. It digitizes and transports RF spectrum over IP networks in a way that preserves both frequency and timing characteristics, and then faithfully reconstructs the original RF signals to enable processing, recording or retransmission at another location. It enables virtualization and centralization of ground architectures for satellite and range ground systems, teleports, UAV and missile ranges, and ISR data processing.
Samtec was showing their flexible microwave cable assembly that is a U.FL high speed 50 W coax cable that features 500 cycles with U.FL cable plug (HMHF1 Series) and 10 GHz performance (U.FL cable plug) or 20 GHz ( SMA plug). It is a .047" (1.20 mm) diameter flexible 30 AWG coax cable and cable connector kits are also available. They also have a wide array of board-to-board and IC-to-board solutions.
TE Connectivity is very involved in open connectivity architectures as they are an important technology given their advantages of easier reconfiguration, ability to be upgraded, and the larger base of suppliers. VPX is the prevalent standard for embedded high-performance computing with a data rate that can exceed 6.25 Gb/s and TE supplies a wide range of products in this space. They are also involved in the next generation of VPX, V67.3 and working on projects for embedded connectivity.