2008 October

R. A. Wood Associates designed, built, tested, and delivered 2 Electronics Support Switching Units (ESSU) to one of our customers. This was another set of hardware slated to to be installed on a Navy Vessel. The ESSU was designed to be installed between the front end (Antennas, RF amplification switching, filtering) and back end (RF processing) of a complex RF/Microwave system. The purpose of the ESSU was to allow a second front end (RF Subsystem 2) to be switched into the same back end, to make use of the RF signal processing in the back end.

• Wideband RF/Microwave amplifiers
• Our Extreme BW RF amplifier was used in this design for the low frequency, wide bandwidth RF path
• Equalizers and attenuators to align the RF paths
• Some vendor purchased equalizers were used
• R. A. Wood Associates equalizers were also used where vendor equalizers were not available
• Terminated mechanical RF switches (50 ohms)
• Terminated mechanical RF switches (75 ohms)
• HDRFI external RF interface to save RF connector space
• DC power conditioning
• FPGA card to control switches and provide Built-in-test (BIT) status
• LED displays for BIT and switching status
• Custom designed audio switching board