Anatech Electronics Press Release - March 8, 2011

Meet Gareth Llewellyn

Gareth Llewellyn has joined Anatech Electronics as director of U.S. sales, and he is managing all of our company’s sales activities throughout North America, including developing and implementing sales strategies and programs and managing sales representatives.

Gareth has more than 20 years of experience in the RF and microwave industry, and has served in sales, business development, and operations management capacities. He has held various management positions at Micro Networks (a division of Integrated Device Technology), Microwave Device Technology, Emcore Corp., and several other leading microwave companies. He received his BSc degree from Cardiff University in the UK and is a member of the IEEE.

Please join us in welcoming Gareth to our staff!

Custom Products for 700 MHz and All Wireless Bands

As we have mentioned in these pages before, Anatech Electronics has a wide array of standard products designed to aid carriers and OEMs in meeting the needs of new “4G” deployments. However, you need to know that our capabilities go far beyond standard products. In fact, our business has grown so strongly over the years thanks to our ability to design and build custom products with very high performance – and very fast turnaround times. We can do this because we have a vast design library can allows modifications to rapidly be made. Typical examples include:

• Cavity bandpass filters and duplexers for all 700 MHz bands (A through E)

• The ability to produce products with very-low passive intermodulation distortion (PIM).

• Products designed for rugged environments, whether in base stations, on a pole, on top of a building, and many other environmentally-hostile scenarios.

Answers to last month's Sports Trivia Questions

1. What sport did Herve Filion top with a record of 14,084 wins? Harness racing

2. What team hired the NFL's first professional cheerleading squad, in 1972? The Dallas Cowboys

3. What diet drink was hyped by Coca-Cola for having only only calorie, in 1963? Tab

4. What country fielded 1996 Olympic women's teams that won gold in basketball, soccer and softball? The U.S.

Design Engineers
and Defense

Every year various trade magazines ask questions of their subscribers, most of whom are design engineers. However, they don’t often ask them about how they feel about issues like defense, but rather more nitty-gritty issues. A recent poll of RF and microwave designers asked just these questions, and the results were a bit of a mixed bag.

The respondents, of which there were 703, said they believe the Middle East is of greatest concern militarily, followed by China, America’s second largest trading partner, and then by Iran. Russia ranked about the same as Pakistan, which you might think would be a greater problem, owing to the country's 100-plus arsenal of nuclear weapons and instability. The Middle East as a whole was considered a greater threat than all the other choices combined.

They also overwhelming believe the world is a much more dangerous place than it was just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there was unbridled optimism about the future role of RF and microwave components in defense systems. They also believe the U.S. spends a reasonable amount of its budget on defense, and when combined with those who believe we should spend more represented an overwhelming majority.

Nevertheless, they also believe not all this money is well spent -- but rather that some of it is ill used or just plain misspent. The people who believe the money is somewhat wasted and poorly spent trumped those who believe defense spending is well taken care of. They also believe that SIGINT and ELINT are where the money should go, followed by electronic warfare. Adding them (as they are of the same ilk) soundly beat radar and communications.

What are your feelings? Send us an e-mail with your thoughts and we’ll publish them (anonymously of course) in our next issue.

So Much for Social Networking

If you’re like us, you may be wondering just how valuable engineers believe social networking is to their work. The answer, published in the February issue of Design News is – not much. Less than 25% of the respondents said they use social networking in their work. Of those, only 15.7% did so every day – and 47% say they never use social networks to help them in their work. Of those who do, LinkedIn was their choice, followed by product-specific online forums, and they use them for sharing knowledge among their peers, networking, and collaborating with others on a design platform. The biggest reason cited for not using social networks was the perceived lack of security and intellectual property and loss of productivity.

New Short-Form Catalog

There’s a lot more here too, so just click here and check it out!

We recently updated our short-form catalog, which now includes much more detailed descriptions of our filters and other products, along with detailed technical descriptions and specifications. You can download the catalog in PDF form by clicking here.

If you have any questions regarding our products, or comments on our newsletter, please email us at:

LTE Infrastructure = Big Business

A recent report from InStat provides some interesting projections for “4G” wireless, including a projected $15.1 billion in global LTE expenditures in 2012, the availability of LTE to 1.85 billion globally, with Japan the most by the end of 2014. In addition, InStat projects that LTE networks will generate 50% of baakhaul demand in North America, and through Huawei and Ericsson, Vodafone purchased 1,500 LTE base stations in Germany last year. The information comes from “The State of the LTE Market: CAPEX, Deployments, Subscribers, and Services”.

Goodbye “All You Can Eat”

Verizon will phase out its unlimited data plans this summer in favor of tiered plans, according to comments from Verizon Communications CFO Fran Shammo, who said that the company’s unlimited data plans were "never a long-term strategy" and the company planned to shift to tiered pricing in the coming months. Her comments came after Verizon introduced the iPhone for its 3G network. AT&T made a similar change after it debuted the iPhone. Verizon now offers a $30 unlimited data plan for smartphones, and AT&T now offers a 2 GB, $25 plan and a 200 MB, $15 plan.

Wither WiMAX?

Sprint, which with its partner Clearwire has been by far the greatest champion of WiMAX technology in the U. S., may be dumping it for LTE, which will reportedly will not require massive hardware changes. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress, Sprint executives said the company will evaluate customer migration from CDMA to WiMAX over the next four to six months, analyze the data and make its decision. A Sprint spokesman said LTE could be running in 2012 with nationwide coverage by 2013.

You Can Run….

The free-electron laser (FEL), the Navy’s answer to knocking enemy weapons from the sky with light has run its electron injector at a record 500 kV, another step to making the “death ray” viable for shipboard use. The goal of the high-energy laser (and rail gun) programs is to leapfrog what can be achieved by “shooting metal things to knock out other metal things”. The 2020s may be the timeframe when a laser or rail gun can be mounted on a ship because an FEL currently produce a 14-kW beam but needs to get to at least 100 kV to defend a ship. The FEL is the most-powerful beam in the world and can cut through 20 ft. of steel per second, and the ultimate goal is to generate a megawatt of laser power that can burn through 2,000 ft. of steel per second.

Sports Trivia Questions!

2. What position must college footballers play to receive the Davey O'Brien Award?

3. What racing competition became a best-of-nine series in 1995?