Discontentment at RF Central

Several years ago, I worked for a TV station in Miami that had gotten a bunch of Eurotek microwave STL and ENG link radio units out of the Sprint/Nextel MMDS rebanding deal. Apparently, at the time, Sprint’s tradeoff to get the spectrum was that they had to provide new 2 ghz microwave ENG gear to any TV station whose stuff would have been obsoleted by the new bandplan. Some stations got a different one, others got the Eurotrash, I mean, Eurotek.

We had quite a few of them, all in relatively non-critical service. One of our older engineers there was trying to keep them all alive but his success was limited as the 2 ghz and particularly the 7 ghz units liked to lose reference oscillators which were made of pure Unobtainium.

The units had constant cooling issues that led to a lot of power supply and amplifier failures too.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was a kinda cool platform for its time… all modular and a 1U mainframe could contain any mix of transmitters (upconverters), receivers (downconverters), power amplifiers, ASI stream multiplexers or demultiplexers, and can even interleave general purpose data over the connection and make it available via standard Ethernet ports on either end.

Unfortunately it’s about like most other Italian RF gear I’ve worked on, which is to say……. questionable garbage.

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