Tower Top Amplifier tops expectations for Tier 1 US OEM

The TTA development project exceeded customer expectations in terms of both performance and time to completion, and at the same time has halved order-to-shipment time.

Like Filtronic’s renowned Tower Mounted Amplifiers for the Cellular industry, the custom units will be manufactured in the company’s facility in Salisbury, Maryland.

“A leading OEM operating in the public safety market was searching for a new domestic US supplier for TTAs, due to product obsolescence and technological advancements,” said Walter Magiera, Chief Commercial Officer for Filtronic. “The company’s existing supply chain was unable to meet its challenging specification, so they approached Filtronic as an existing supplier. The client wanted a range of product enhancements, including more consistent performance between sites, reduced time-to-market, ease of ordering as well as a strong desire to simplify installation.”

Filtronic completed the total product development, from inception through to product qualification, in less than six months.

The new TTA not only meets the existing specification but also delivers all the performance improvements the customer required, including smart redundancy.

“As an expert in developing products for the public safety market for over 30 years, Filtronic was able to accelerate product development,” said Magiera. “This was made possible by being agile and by the application of lean philosophies, as well as benefitting from our experience in this sector. We were also able to meet all our client’s goals of reducing inventory and decreasing the order-to-shipment time down to two weeks from the industry standard of four weeks.”

The Filtronic TTA system delivers smart redundancy and dependable performance, continuously monitoring the health of the balanced quadrature-coupled amplifiers.

In the case of a failure in one of the amplifiers, the system can continue to operate using the redundant amplifier.

If both amplifiers cease operation, the system will function in a bypass mode.

The TTA system exceeded performance requirements, providing excellent system flatness across the passband and low system noise figure, while retaining linearity and out-of-band rejection to ensure that mission-critical networks will operate reliably in congested spectrum environments.

It also delivers a lighter weight solution in a smaller footprint, allowing better utilisation of the communication tower.

Filtronic will be exhibiting at APCO 2021 in San Antonio, Texas (August 15 – 18).