Industry Interview: AR Modular RF
SOTECH 2010 Volume: 8 Issue: 2 (March)
A: The folk at the AR Modular RF group in Bothell, Wash., have been building RF amplifiers in one shape or another since 1971. We were known for many years as an EMC test amplifier manufacturer under the name Kalmus. In 2001 the group was purchased by Amplifier Research in Souderton, Pa., was renamed AR Kalmus and began to focus on areas other than EMC test amplifiers. One of the many successful product lines that evolved since that time was amplifiers for use in communications, especially tactical military booster amplifiers that are designed to work with single and multiband tactical transceivers. In 2004 we changed our name from AR Kalmus to AR Modular RF to better reflect the modular RF designs that we have been making in recent years.
Q: What’s your role with the company and how long have you been at AR?
A: I joined the company in January 2004 as the vice president/general manager with the task of finding new direction for the group in order to give it long term stability. As a radio communications engineer from many years ago, it was natural for me to push the group into communications markets. Hiring new engineers and support staff, we began by bringing a couple of new designs into production status and heavily promoting ourselves in the tactical communications market. We also realized that there is a demand for embedded “OEM black box and brick amplifiers” for all kinds of commercial, industrial and scientific applications, some of them with significant repeat business, which was good for our ongoing business.
Q: So what are your primary markets now?
A: Over the past five years the general mix has been about half commercial work and half military, but this past year or so we have seen a fairly dramatic increase in our military and government systems integration house work. Of course this increase has been driven by world events, but at the same time we have been working hard to bring new technology into our product ranges overall, as well as designing new products specifically for the military end-user market.
We appear to have reached “critical mass” in the tactical market and are now well known by not only the end-users, but also by large OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] who build the tactical transceivers that work with our amplifiers, and so we have been fortunate enough to see quite a surge in business in recent years.
Q: You say you have been working hard on new products. What kind of products have you brought to the market recently, and what prompted some of those new designs?
A: In the early days our tactical product lines were rather large and required operators to manually adjust them to the correct band or function. As the base of business grew, it became clear to us that these radio operators had a lot more on their minds than manually tuning amplifiers, so we came up with the idea of electronically controlling our amplifiers so that the operators wouldn’t need to interact with the amplifiers at all.
Our first product to go “auto tune” was the KMW1031, which was a derivation of the old KMW 1030, a 20W output unit designed for use with multiband tactical handheld transceivers in the band 30 to 512MHz. This unit is now on its third generation design and the fourth generation design is already well under development, offering the best performance in a small, fully submersible unit without any controls for the operator to worry about.
That work has flowed over to higher power designs at the 50W and 75W levels, whose primary roles are as vehicle mounted amplifiers. However, our new AR-50 is small enough for some users to consider it as a “back pack” transportable unit, running from batteries as a forward position communications center [and] using its high power to reach over difficult terrain or break through interference. Both of these new units offer low noise amplifiers in the receive path and steep-sided filters to help protect the receiver system from co-site interference when working over UHF SATCOM satellites. Of course they are all capable of carrying the vast array of modern modulation formats such as SINCGARS, Havequick, HPW, as well as the more conventional AM and FM modes.
Q: What do you think the future holds for AR Modular RF—will you concentrate on just military or do you have other plans?
A: The future looks very promising for us. With solid growth over the past five years, we look forward to growth in our military market as we continue to expand our already substantial line of tactical amplifiers. We are working closely with radio vendors on new designs for accessory amplifier products, as well as expanding our own offerings.
For instance we mentioned UHF SATCOM earlier, for which there is a huge demand. A new satellite system is coming on line soon called MUOS, which will offer about 10 times the UHF capacity of the old systems, and that along with new waveforms like IW will drive more demand for UHF SATCOM amplifiers.
We are continuing to build newly designed communications amplifiers for the OEM market from 10 to 200W or more in power, using the latest technology devices that offer more power, efficiency and smaller design packages than the last generation of designs. These designs include high power specially designed systems up to 5kW or more, and specially designed communications and EW application modules up to 6GHz. We look forward to growing this “invisible” part of our business by building smarter and better performance products that evolve from much of the market leading development work that we have been doing in the tactical space. ♦