The end of the Cold War six years ago signaled the end of defense as a driver of technology creation. Engineers have since sought ways to apply defense designs to commercial services.
“There’s a lot of novelty going on around wireless base stations,” said Dr. Oliver Hilsenrath, former vice president of technology for Geotek Communications Inc.
“We’ve seen a lot of innovations in the last 10 years, but radio is really as antiquated as it was 30 to 50 years ago,” Hilsenrath said.
As the Cold War ended, Hilsenrath was chief engineer of the communications division of Rafael, the military research arm of Israel. Rafael also is a Geotek partner.
Hilsenrath entered the ground floor of Geotek in New Jersey after leaving Rafael in the early 1990s. At the time, Geotek was small and challenged with building abstract concepts into a commercial business.
Now that Geotek has evolved from a developing company to a system operator with hundreds of employees, Hilsenrath has moved on again, back to the development end of things.
He has created a private technology company, U.S. Wireless Corp. in San Ramon, Calif. The company is designing products that take advantage of core technologies developed by the defense industry.
U.S. Wireless’ first product is the FlyBeam, an infrastructure device that interfaces with existing base station hardware. The company says the FlyBeam adds functionality to cellular base stations and increases capacity beyond current saturation levels.
“Electromagnetic energy is analog, but we manage it digitally. [The FlyBeam] is a digital front-end to an analog world,” Hilsenrath said.
The FlyBeam is a combination computer and receiver. It analyzes the signal and sends it along more efficiently, using the most recent discoveries in the radiofrequency world to increase call handling, said U.S. Wireless spokesman Curt Burkhart.
The company hopes to sell the device to wireless carriers both in the United States and internationally. The FlyBeam attaches to existing antennas.
“If there’s one piece of the base station that the [network manager] controls, it is the antenna. And he doesn’t have to change antennas. It will connect to all antennas, to all relevant tubes,” Hilsenrath said.
U.S. Wireless has two divisions, Mantra and Labyrinth Communications. Labyrinth will manage and sell the FlyBeam.
The San Jose, Calif.-based Zeta division of Sierra Networks Inc. has been contracted to build the FlyBeam. Zeta designs and manufactures radio systems and Sierra is a large producer of radio and network equipment.
Zeta will provide U.S. Wireless with hardware and equipment, technical support and testing facilities that will help U.S. Wireless quickly develop and test the device. The companies will jointly configure the product’s hardware design and production line.
The next generation of FlyBeam will be the RadioCamera, a location technology designed with the metropolitan environment in mind. The company describes RadioCamera as a “proprietary, single site, autonomous caller direction finding and location finding technology.” RadioCamera collects the reflections generated by a caller using a handset, and reconstructs the coordinates of the caller’s location.
“The toughest thing in wireless management is finding the subscriber. Work has been done on several different location technologies for several years, but the technology just isn’t there yet. But we’re going to solve it with a new signal analysis using learning systems,” Hilsenrath said.
U.S. Wireless’ first application for the RadioCamera will be for 411 location information service.
