23 Jan 2012

New CommScope Ultra-Wideband Antennas

US cellular infrastructure provider, CommScope has introduced a new family of ultra-wideband cellular base station antennas. These antennas allow installation and operation today, while providing for the additional bandwidth requirements for the future when additional spectrum is released.

The CommScope High-Bandwidth, HW family of Ultra-Wideband Base Station Antennas, is now available and enables operation over a frequency range of 1710-2690 MHz. By covering this wide range of frequencies it enables antenna installations, which are an expensive element of a base station to be future-proofed, thereby reducing the long term costs.

Commented Ray Butler, vice president, Product Line and Engineering, Base Station Antennas “CommScope’s new family of high performance, ultra-wideband antennas will be very beneficial for the forward-looking operator who may need to deploy additional radio frequency spectrum and support higher bandwidth demands in the future.”

He continued: “With the HW family, an operator can install the relevant model today that will not only cover its current frequency requirements but also provide exceptional performance in the future as new spectrum becomes available. In the past, the operator would have had to deploy two or three separate antennas in order to support the same amount of bandwidth.”

There are three different configurations for the new CommScope antennas: two, four or six dual-polarization radiating arrays. Each of these is contained under a single radome.

CommScope have detailed some of the advantages and benefits of their new antennas:

• Superior, repeatable electrical performance from every unit

• Potentially higher spectral efficiency through 100% passive intermodulation, PIM testing. This is particularly important where many bands and carriers are used

• Twice the bandwidth of typical high-band antennas

• Small physical footprint

• Consolidated design. This can mean that fewer antennas are required and this results in lower-cost deployments

As a result of their wideband capability, the antennas are anticipated to be used for a wide variety of applications including 2G, 2.5G, 3G and 4G environments for systems. As there are no technical restrictions on use the antennas can be used for including LTE, UMTS, CDMA, GSM, and WiMAX. Accordingly, operators can upgrade or switch to different technologies or frequencies as their needs change.

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