SED Systems has been in business for more than 50 years — the company's technology extends from their SATCOM products to system engineering solutions to complex problems and Q/V-band antenna and RF systems.
Peter Waskowic.
The company offers complex RF system designs as well as the deployment of gateways and the firm is a forerunner in Ka-band gateway development as well as a premier provider for Q- and V-band. SED has continually evolved in step with the satellite industry offering a broad range of capabilities and technologies.
The key focus is RF gateways and SED Systems specializes in designing and deploying those innovative gateway designs for their customers around the world. The firm also offers satellite uplink products, such as single-channel and multi-channel modulators. To expand their capabilities in that area, the company announced earlier this year their rollout of large aperture composite carbon fiber antenna products that serve the needs of large-scale earth stations and TT&C systems. This carbon fiber antenna line offers compelling new innovations and cost effectively supports the very demanding surface tolerance accuracy required by the higher frequency bands. D4 (see below) helps to support this market segment as it has a wider frequency range that is ideal for the higher bandwidth applications found in current and planned HTS systems.
In addition, SED Systems builds a number of specialized software and hardware systems to perform satellite frequency and capacity planning, as well as resource management. During the last few years, they have greatly expanded their offerings for the cable television marketplace and are now one of the world leaders in distributed access architectures such as the DOCSIS 3.1 Remote PHY technology.
The firm also builds many unique and custom software and hardware products. Whatever their customers need, the company can build, as they have more than 100 system engineers, hardware designers, digital and signal processing experts as well as software developers on staff to ensure those dreams become reality.
Decimator D4 is SED Systems' latest generation spectrum analyzer. The firm has had Decimator products in the marketplace for over 10 years and the D4 is their fourth generation of the product line. D4 includes evolutionary as well as new features.
The Decimator D3 has been extremely popular and the D4 includes all of the capabilities of that product, as well as several new capabilities. The frequency range of the unit has been increased to 6.5 GHz on the high end, which provides direct functionality for C-band transmit and receive signals. This also makes the product ready for the higher frequency IFs that are required for new Q-/V-band systems.
In terms of new D4 features, the key item is the signal analysis capability for the satellite standard DVB-S/S2/S2X. The D4 can simultaneously demodulate as many as 16 signals and also provides digital demodulator characteristics, such as EVM and a constellation display. A future planned feature is for D4 is transport stream output. The user interface has been updated to meet current standards. The HTML5 user interface runs on all browsers and devices — this enables the D4 to efficiently run locally or remotely from any location around the world.
The main technology drivers for the platform are the new signal analysis capabilities that allow broadcast facilities (and other customers) to integrate the D4 into their systems and to provide improved monitoring capabilities at a reasonable price within teleports and uplink facilities. The D4 is also a general purpose signal processing platform with extra processing power that can be harnessed to provide custom capabilities as needed for the company's existing and new customers that have specialized requirements. In particular, the increased frequency range is highly useful for new Q-/V-band satellite transponders that use more bandwidth and require an extended frequency range to monitor signals. The Decimator is SED System's flagship product line and the company is delighted to be able to introduce the new features of this offering to IBC attendees, as the unit has high relevance to the broadcast industry that attend IBC. SED Systems is currently launching and taking orders for the Decimator D4 and units will be shipped into the marketplace this fall/winter.
The software systems the firm builds for resource management, frequency planning and capacity planning provide satellite operators with the tools to maximize satellite bandwidth resources. This results in operators being able to squeeze more revenues and margin out of their existing assets.
SED Systems offers products, services and entire systems as COTS solutions, or as custom developed solutions for specific customer requirements. SED is involved from the earliest stages of concept development and requirements definition through the full duration of long term support over operational lifetimes of 15+ years. Their 50+ years in business combined with high levels of repeat business from many long term customers demonstrates their ability to consistently provide solutions with compelling value.
Interview conducted on Friday, September 13, 2019, at IBC2019 in Amsterdam
