Introducing the Remote Tilt, Non-Mechanical Antenna

At the WiMax World Conference in Boston this week, Irish antenna manufacturer Stella Doradus introduced a new WiMax antenna, the first solid state remote electrical tilt solution for WiMax base stations. The Stella Netamorphic Antenna has no moving parts, and can be tilted remotely from a network operations center. By eliminating the need for tower climbs, the company says the antenna can save carriers many millions of dollars.

Justin Collery, Stella Doradus’ vice president of sales and marketing, says WiMax’s potential is just about limitless. “I heard an executive at Motorola say the other day that he was talking to one of his partners and they had come up with 25 innovative devices that they could see happening with WiMax,” he says. “Now, to my mind, that’s kind of like sitting down in the early ‘90s and saying, ‘You know what, the Internet’s going to be something really big, it’s going to be something really exciting – and I can think of 25 or 30 great Web sites that are really going to make it.’ It’s going to be much, much bigger than that.”

Stella Doradus, Collery says, expects WiMax to have as transformative an impact on people’s lives as the Internet did in the ‘90s. “We can see WiMax cards, we can see WiMax GPS, WiMax phones – everything is going to go towards this particular technology,” he says.

Still, Collery says the challenge for the operators that are planning nationwide WiMax rollouts is to build networks that can compete successfully with DSL, cable and 3G. “For them to succeed, the network has got to be better than the existing one,” he says. “It can’t have the same problems that cell phone networks have today in the U.S. – that’s a key requirement.”

Of course, to enable that, you need a good antenna.

The Stella Netamorphic Antenna produces equal RF power across an entire cell, along with a reduction in cell-to-cell interference, the company claims, by more than 800 percent – and the antenna’s solid state design enables highly reliable remote electrical tilt. “It doesn’t seize, it doesn’t freeze, it doesn’t creep,” Collery says. “When you take this antenna out of the box day one and you tilt it, if you do it again ten years later, it’s going to tilt exactly the same way – it doesn’t change, and this is a big plus.”

The solid state design, Collery says, is what makes the real difference in terms of the antenna’s remote tilting abilities. “There are antennas which can do this at the moment, but they use motors – they’re mechanical,” he says. “The problem with that is, if they’re in the desert, they’re susceptible to sandstorms; if they’re by the beach, they get salt in them and they degrade; if they’re up in icy places, they’ll freeze up – so they’re mechanical, they do it, but they’re not a great solution.”

And Collery says the Netamorphic Antenna tilts extremely quickly. “Because it’s solid state, it can tilt in 0.002 of a second,” he says. “That compares with about 20 seconds for a normal antenna.”

The antenna also relays data ranging from RF properties to local temperature back to a central SQL database. That allows the network operations center both to assess historical data and to get instant feedback on any changes. “It allows an operator to hook directly into any antenna, tilt the antenna, and instantly see the effects on the network – if it’s good, they can leave it, and if it’s bad, they can change it back again – and because it’s so quick, the customers will never even realize it,” Collery says.

Collery says the antennas, which will sell for about $5,000 each, are currently shipping for trial with key customers and will be generally available in two months’ time. “This is a big, big change in antenna technology,” he says. “It’s a win/win for operators: using this antenna, they get better customer service and they save millions of dollars at the same time, so they cannot lose. It makes WiMax deployment a reality.”