RF Engines continues on track

Three more engineers up to PhD level, have joined the company following the success of winning several major surveillance and monitoring contracts. The first contract is for an advanced and very low power transceiver product for covert surveillance applications. The second contract is for the identification and classification of RF emissions from various electronic devices. The third is for an industrial test application that requires the measurement and classification of wide band impulse type signals that are discharged by the breakdown in insulation in high voltage electricity generation systems.

The company is also making significant advances in the research phase of a new Reconfigurable Receiver architecture design, a research programme that has been part-funded over the last year by the DTI. The next stage in this programme is to build a prototype system, and this follow-on development programme is also likely to be part-funded by the DTI.

The company has also won significant contracts for high-speed multi-Gigasample per second FFT designs utilising the latest Virtex 5 FPGAs, as well as several multiple channelisation designs for new satellite communications systems.

As a result of these new contracts, RFEL is actively recruiting more high-calibre designers to augment the team who are all based on the Isle of Wight. John Summers, RFEL's MD, added, 'There's no doubt that being located as we are on the Isle of Wight helps with attracting top people who are looking to strike the right work and quality of life balance desk to dinghy in less than 15 minutes does actually help with creativity!'