BBN International Ltd

BBN International supplies RFOptics' full range of RF over Fibre systems including RF up to 40GHz and optical delay lines with fixed or switchable delays. Now we are announcing new 5G testing and radar altimeter system solutions.

RF Over Fibre and 5G

Major efforts are being made to address the nascent 5G and 6G markets. Since RF cables and RF switches perform poorly at the high 5G frequency bands, RF over fibre up to 6GHz is of interest. There is also an increasing interest in 24GHz, 39GHz, and 43GHz for 5G DAS applications that are required for high-speed applications such as telemedicine, autonomous vehicles, and IoT.

RFOptic has already successfully completed various trials with major global vendors. RF over Fiber (RFoF) links are optimised to the requirements of the 5G market, with their wide bandwidth, high dynamic range, excellent noise figure, compatibility with frequency division duplexing (FDD) and time division duplexing (TDD) systems and with local and remote management of optical and RF signals. These 5G solutions have demonstrated excellent performance in error vector magnitude (EVM) and adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) under high-resolution modulations such as 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) delivering well over 1000 ‘long-term evolution’ (LTE) subscriber channels at once. 5G applications include optical switching as a replacement for RF switching infrastructure offering unlimited bandwidth and excellent performance compared to RF switches.

New 6GHz Phase Matched RF Over Fibre System

A new phase-matched multi-channel RF over fibre (RFoF) subsystem has been developed. The system is provided as a complete end-to-end RFoF product. This subsystem with 6 RFoF links achieves better than ±6° of full band phase. In general, the phase-matched RFoF links provide a superior platform for phase sensitive applications such as Direction Finding systems (DF). In combination with RFOptic RFoF programmable links, which have gain adjustment capability with 0.5dB resolution, it is possible for the first time to achieve both gain and phase match at once in one multi-channel RFoF system.

New Altimeter Optical Delay Line

RFOptic has launched a high frequency Altimeter Optical Delay Line (AODL). This new AODL provides a high performance solution for testing and calibration of radar altimeter systems. It is a compact solution providing superb signal performance and altitude simulation accuracy with ultra-silent operation. The AODL can be configured to emulate a single altitude or more than 4,096 altitude steps. The control and monitoring is done using a front panel, a navigation switch, and an LCD display or via a USB connection using configuration tool software. For automated testing applications, the USB API is available. In general, the AODL offers very high accuracy up to 0.3ns for altitude steps under 2m and around 0.1% above. The maximum altitude can reach 30Km in one enclosure.