Design and Development

Some products are designed to meet specific customer requirements. Some are one-off items, whilst others like the D-Cam and the MVL-D2 are standard products. Gigawave also carries out bespoke design projects for BBC Research, Dorna (MotoGP), ISC (World Rally Championship), and other organisations.
The Gigawave Design and Development department consists of a team of RF engineers, software developers, systems engineers, and CAD designers, each specialists in their own fields.

Almost every aspect of new product design and development, including multi-layer PCB board design, is undertaken in-house by Gigawave engineers. In addition, CAD draftsmen produce all the drawings needed to manufacture the incredibly rugged housings that Gigawave is famous for. These are milled out of solid aluminium by specialist contractors using high-speed CNC machines.

Historically, Gigawave's strength has been its understanding of RF. With the advent of digital links this knowledge, acquired through operational experience, has been vitally important. Today, software developers are an essential part of the Gigawave development team as are the hardware and systems engineers, all of whom have worked together as a team to produce the new generation of digital links from Gigawave.

Digital Developments
The biggest challenge that Gigawave has faced over the past 15 years is undoubtedly the transition from analogue to digital links. For almost five years a team of Gigawave development engineers, each a specialist in their own field, has worked to produce a new generation of digital microwave links, with exceptional performance.
It was clear from the very beginning that it was never going to be easy to squeeze 270Mb/sec into a single 8MHz channel, and that delay was going to be a key issue. MPEG 2 was never designed for contribution cameras and so there was always going to be a trade-off between a robust RF signal and picture quality when using industry standard COFDM modulation.

The 'plug-in' encoder modules can easily be changed on-site to meet operational requirements, or upgraded as new compression techniques evolve.

Whilst much discussion has centered around compression techniques the real secret of Gigawave's success is simply down to the fact that Gigawave understands RF. Because of this, the company has been able to offer outstanding RF performance from its new range of digital links.

Design and Development
Production and Testing
Special Projects
Sales and Marketing
Customer Support
Finance and Administration

To continue the tour, click on the: