EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE

COMMUNICATIONS - A BRIEF HISTORY

PRESENTED BY RICHARD U. LAINE, PE
P R I N C I PA L E N G I N E E R , AV I AT N E T W O R K S , S A N TA C L A R A , C A 9 5 0 5 4

JULY 2011
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Agenda
Historical Perspective, not without controversy
Wireless in its Infancythe Intertwining of Edison, Marconi, and

Tesla

Propagationthe Intertwining of Huygens, Newton, Fresnel, and

Einstein

Microwave RadiosThe Early Days: PPM digital, Analog FM-FDM

Evolution of the U.S. Microwave Communications Industry
Evolution to Aviat Networks
Upgrade from Analog to Digital Microwave Hops
Digital Microwave AttributesA Media Comparison

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Wireless Communications The Early Days

Excerpt from the Scientific American July 1892
In the specification to one of his recent patents,
Thomas A. Edison says:

I have discovered that if sufficient elevation be obtained to

overcome the curvature of the earths surface and to reduce to
the minimum the earths absorption, electric signaling between
distant points can be carried on by induction without the use of
wires.
MICROWAVE PATH ENGINEERING 117 YEARS AGO!

Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931)Ohio

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

The First Wireless Communications Age

The radio is one hundred years old, but it doesnt look it!

... it is interesting to note that Samuel F. B. Morses telegraph was followed

only 40 years later by the increasingly remarkable invention of radio
frequency transmission.
Thomas Edison experimented with signals that could be generated and
detected at a distance in 1883, but did not appreciate the importance of
the Edison Effect. Edison received a patent for wireless telegraphy in
1885, but was preoccupied with other projects. Edison sold the patent for
a song to Marconi, who put extensive effort into the technology. By 1901,
he sent Morse Code from Massachusetts to Cornwall, England.
Roger Rusch
Applied Microwave & Wireless Fall 1995

Samuel F. B. Morse (1791 1872) Scotland

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Wireless Marconi Inventor of the Radio?

January 1897
An invention which promises to be of the greatest practical value in the world of telegraphy has
received its first public announcement at the hands of Mr. William H. Preece, the telegraphic
expert of the London post office. During a lecture on "Telegraphy Without Wires" recently
delivered in London, Mr. Preece introduced a young Italian, a Mr. Marconi, who, he said, had
recently come to him with such a system. Telegraphing without wires was, of course, no new
idea. In 1893, telegrams were transmitted a distance of three miles across the Bristol Channel by
induction. Young Marconi solved the problem on different principles, and post office officials had
made a successful test on Salisbury Plain at a distance of three-quarters of a mile.
Scientific American - January 1897
The roots of modern radio-links can be perceived in the first experiments carried out by Marconi,
as he used very high frequenciespractically in the field of microwavesand had recourse to
parabolic-cylinder reflectors. Here is the first invention which Marconi anticipated. Many scientists
before Marconi had devoted their work to the electric and magnetic phenomena, taking
advantage of the extraordinary synthesis which James Clerk Maxwells equations had given
them. In 1894, when he was only twenty, the young man from Bologna set up his first laboratory
at Villa Griffone, about fourteen kilometers from his native city. Marconis basic contribution, for
which he deserves the name of inventor of the radio, was, first of all, that he modulated by a
signal the electromagnetic waves that a spark produced in a Hertz oscillator sent in space.
Gian Carlo Corazza 1996 European Conference for Radio-Relay, Bologna
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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Guglielmo Marconi
(1874-1937) Italy
1909 Nobel Prize for Wireless Telegraphy

James Clerk Maxwell

(1831-1879) Scotland

Wireless Marconi Inventor of the Radio? Or Not!!

On 11 June 1943, the U.S Supreme Court overturned most of Marconis
wireless communications patents thus upholding Nikola Teslas earlier
September 1897 patent for radio, that in 1904 was reversed by the U.S. Patent
Office and awarded to Marconi, based upon Teslas wireless communication
demonstrations in 1894.
This Supreme Court decisionfive months after he died impoverished, alone
in a New York hotel roomin effect recognized Tesla (who, shortly after
arriving in the U.S. in 1884, had worked for Thomas Edison for $18 per week)
as the inventor of the radio.
This added to Teslas remarkable credentials as the inventor and architect of
alternating current machinery and long-distance electrical distribution, this
rendering obsolete his adversary Edisons direct current electrical
powerhouses that had been built up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) Austrian Empire

The Man who Invented the 20th Century

Propagation Huygens Principle? Or Not!!

Christiaan Huygens, a contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton, is said to have gained most of his insights into wave motion by
observing waves in a canal. In 1678, this great Dutch physicist wrote the treatise Traite de la Lumiere on the wave theory of
light, and in this work he stated that the wavefront of a propagating wave of light at any instant conforms to the envelope of
spherical wavelets (Huygens Combination Wavefront of separate waves) emanating from every point on the wavefront at
the prior instant, with the understanding that the wavelets have the same speed as the overall wave.

Christiaan Huygens
(1629-1695) - Netherlands

Sir Isaac Newton

(1643-1727) - England

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Augustin-Jean Fresnel
(1788-1827) - France

Albert Einstein
(1879-1955) - Germany

Propagation Huygens Principle? Or Not!!

An illustration of this idea, now
known as Huygens' Principle, is
shown. Disbelieving, Newton
continued to push his Corpuscular
Theory of particle propagation of
light, so because of that it was not
until some 100 years later when
Augustin-Jean Fresnel of Fresnel
lens and Fresnel zone fame

Illustration of Huygens Principle.

revisited Huygens Principle in 1815

The pinholes in the mask act as

secondary point sources of radio
energy.

that his term diffraction was

reintroduced.*

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Einstein and others opine the duality

that light functions as both a particle
(per Newton) and a wave (per
Huygens) depending on how the
experiment is conducted and when
observations are made.

Microwave Radio Links - The Early Days

2 GHz PPM Digital Radios
6 Bays!! 24xVF or 24x300 baud data channel capacity!! General Electrics
2 GHz radar-like pulse position modulated (PPM, used during WW2 then
declassified) hot standby terminal. Many hundreds of similar GE and ITT
PPM radio hops were deployed in long pipeline, power and turnpike
systems in the 1940s-50s, some up to 75 hops in length with no end-toend noise buildup (like modern digital systems), all over the U.S. and
worldwide for the military.

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Microwave Radio Links - The Early Days

AT&T Long-Haul Analog Routes Deployed 35,000 TD2 Repeaters
The San Francisco-New York transcontinental route of hundreds of 4 GHz
TD2 analog FM-FDM hops completed in 1951 for all long distance VF and
TV was upgraded with high-capacity L6 GHz TH1 radios in 1955 and
improved TD3 radios in 1962.
The performance of analog hops was far more
affected than later generation digital radio hops
to equipment nonlinearities, interference,
thermal noise, multipath distortion,
waveguide echoes and moding,
and fading.

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

U.S. Microwave Industry Evolution Through 1991

The Early Days
U.S. Microwave Communications
Manufacturers from 1931 (ITT) through 1991
Farinon/Harris MCD (1958) and
DMC/Stratex Networks (1984) merged to form

EXTINCT

50

Harris Stratex Networks (2007), which changed names to

Aviat Networks (2010)

EXTANT

20

(growing rapidly)

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

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How We Evolved into Aviat Networks

Kurt Appert*

Len Erickson

1944 San Francisco

1947 San Carlos, CA

Lenkurt Electric Company

1959 Merger

Bill Farinon
Bill Gibson

Feb 1958
San Carlos
Jan 1984
San Jose

1980
Merger
1963
1981
1982

Jan 26, 2007 Merger

GTE Network Systems

2002

1998
1983

Microwave Communications
Division (MCD)
Siemens
Transmission Systems

1984

Boca Raton

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Siemens Information and

Communications Networks

2010

* Bancroft Library Oral history: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=kurt%20appert

EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

The Migration from Analog to Digital Microwave Links

Its Been a Challenge!
Canadian Marconi delivered the first PCM digital radios to private

microwave users in North America in 1970, some hops remaining in

service into the millennium, thus triggering the rapid development and
deployment of higher capacity (first 1152 VF ch/78 Mbit/s, then 1344 VF
ch/90 Mbit/s) digital radios for LOS (line-of-sight) radio-relay hops.
This culminated in 1980 with the realization that the alarm/network

management systems and adaptive equalization in these trailblazing

digital radios were often found totally inadequate to accommodate the
fragile, bursty characteristics of many high capacity digital microwave
radios and spectral distortion caused by dispersive fading in hops not
before seen in FM-FDM analog radio systems.

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

The Migration from Analog to Digital Microwave Links

Its Been a Challenge!
The 1980s thus brought about dramatic improvements in digital

microwave modulation efficiencies and, with new adaptive equalization

and powerful error correction, robustness to the dispersive (spectrumdistorting) fade activity that so degraded digital radio hop performance in
the 1970s.
The mid-1990s heralded DSP equalizers that replaced discrete devices

in far more robust advanced asynchronous (PDH) and 2016/1890 ch

SONET/SDH point-to-point TDM digital radios. The FCCs relocation of
analog microwave hops from 2 GHz in the late 1990s to accommodate
cellular deployment sped this digital migration.
These new PDH and SDH digital technologies supported the explosive

birth of new high-performance terrestrial Fixed Wireless Systems and

Fixed Wireless Access networks in all of their forms, e.g. Point-to-Point
and Point-to-Multipoint, in synergism with fiber optics and FSO (freespace optical) networks.
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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Digital Microwave Attributes - a Media Comparison

Superior availability (uptime) route security (no fiber optics cable cuts)

Long

Favors
Fiber

High qualityno multihop noise addition as in analog microwave hops

Rapid deployment over difficult terrain and into urban areas, unlike cable
Economical and secureno copper or fiber optic cable deployment with

right-of-way and security issues, and very high costs

Robust to fading and interference compared to analog microwave hops
Much less sensitive to antenna feeder system and long-delayed ,on-path

Turn-Up Time

Rapidly expandable and upgradeable, in-service if protected

Microwave or Fiber

Favors
Microwave
Short

Low

Transport Choices

Required Transport Capacity

High

echoes compared to analog microwave hops

Radio

Highly efficient data and broadband transport

Exacting in-service visibility of radio hop performance with NMS, PCR
Seamless interconnectivity to an ever-expanding digital transport (fiber

optics and other), PABX/MSC switch, and LAN/IP world

Availability/security

Implementation time
Terrain considerations

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EVOLUTION OF MICROWAVE COMMUNICATIONS: A BRIEF HISTORY

JULY 2011

Payload (transport)
Cost effectiveness

Fiber