The RF Path – Complex, Quite Simply

Car shopping and cell sites. What’s their relationship? Technological complexity, and managing that complexity is important. Erik Lilieholm shares some RF conditioning equipment options that help in this blog.

Multiband-coverSo I bought a new car. It’s been a while since the last time and on the whole an unfamiliar process that few people will come to consider a routine affair. A cursory examination reveals the same four wheels with rubber that meets the road like most cars of the past century as well as a fifth, useful for aiming the equipage in the desired direction. And that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

This car has so many features. There are not just switches and buttons; there are menus to navigate and options to select. My car offers not one, but three ways it can connect with my smartphone and I have yet to explore most of what the results of that might be. In some ways then, cars are more complex than they used to be. On the other hand, so much has also been simplified through intelligence and automation. My car has learned how I want the seat and mirrors positioned, the way I wish the engine and transmission to respond, and my preferred music genre. The moment I touch the door handle, my car recognizes me and remembers all that.

CLICK TO TWEET: How to Simplify the RF Path

On a parallel time scale, cell site installations have evolved to become more complex than ever before. New frequency bands, cell splitting and 4-way MIMO provide incremental capacity growth to keep pace with demand. Coordinating the precise timing of these upgrades optimizes the use of operator funds, but results in a proliferation of RF path configurations according to site-specific constraints, the stage of the upgrade cycle and preparation for the future. The mix of old and new equipment and frequencies raises the potential for misconfiguration and the risk of passive intermodulation (PIM).

As new complexities arise in the RF path, CommScope helps you move past them by providing the right RF conditioning solutions to meet your needs and your schedules. Our portfolio of multiband combiners and tower mounted amplifiers (TMAs) is ready for the future today with support for emerging bands and architectures. Within our vast selection of styles you will most likely find just the diplexer, pentaplexer or multiband TMA your situation requires. And help with choosing the best solution is only a phone call away.

You will also find that our latest generation of RF conditioning solutions takes simplification another step further with features like intelligent direct current (DC) sensing that can automatically configure your RET system top to bottom and enable you to eliminate RET cabling altogether. Reduced size and clever mechanical design make installation quick and simple. Best practice engineering from decades of experience and rigorous testing beyond industry standards ensure the superior robustness and solid PIM performance required for a lifetime of trouble-free service.

Would you like to know more about what we do to simplify your job and how we do it? Browse the links on this page to read the brochures and watch the video. Call your CommScope representative and let’s do things the simple way; the CommScope way.

Oh, just in case you read this blog post a while back and are now wondering – yes, I have kept the old car also and no, that’s not a good example of how to simplify my life…