Technology developed in Hawaii opens new possibilities in carrying
data short distances

By Jim Borg jborg@starbulletin.com

A radio beam developed in Hawaii stands to revolutionize high-speed wireless transmissions over short distances, with huge implications for the military, civil defense and fire fighting. Already, it has been adopted by the Coast Guard and the University of Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology for communications to Sand Island and Coconut Island, respectively. And it promises new possibilities for emergency response, battlefield command and control, and communications for islands, ships, aircraft and offshore oil rigs.

Known as advanced millimeter-wave radio, the information beam was developed by Loea Corp., a subsidiary of Trex Enterprises now run by retired Adm. Thomas Fargo, former commander of U.S. Pacific forces. The beam carries information between two points much like a laser, but without the problems lasers encounter with clouds, rain, fog, smog, vog, smoke, sandstorms, explosive debris and other atmospheric clutter. And at one-tenth the cost of fiber-optic cable, it is practical in places where cables are not, says Fargo, Loea chairman.

“There are two fundamental pieces that are important, and one is the ability to move really high amounts of information to connect places where it does not make sense to run fiber,” Fargo said Friday in a telephone interview from Shanghai, where he was on a trade mission with Gov. Linda Lingle.

“The second one is the military application. The military is very expeditionary today, and we’re going to move into places and move out, and in a lot of cases it doesn’t make sense to lay fiber or set up a significant infrastructure. And the demand for information is really high right down to the smallest units, so I’m hoping Loea can help solve those problems.”

The technology is so new that it was approved only last year for conditional commercial use by the Federal Communications Commission. The final FCC permit is due to be issued on June 24, said Dan Scharre, Loea president and chief executive. The first generation of Loea commercial transceivers send and receive data at a rate of 1.25 gigabits per second at distances of up to 1.75 kilometers, or almost 1.1 miles. That is enough to carry 50 or 60 television channels.

The Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, on Coconut Island in Kaneohe Bay, is using a Loea radio to communicate to the UH-Manoa campus through a transceiver at Windward Community College. “We once could make a cup of coffee before we finished downloading a document,” said Jo-Ann Leong, institute director, in a letter to Loea. “We are now able to achieve connection speeds that make distance education a viable opportunity out here, and high-speed computing connectivity with the Manoa main campus computers and the Maui super computing system is now a reality.”

The Coast Guard has two redundant lines for communications between its District 14 headquarters in the federal building and operations across Honolulu Harbor. “It’s basically a large data pipe, a virtual pipe, that carries all types of communications,” said Cmdr. Chris Meade. In an interview Friday, Meade and fellow communications officer Cmdr. Marc Sanders said the Loea system will be employed in a post-9/11 initiative to coordinate emergency communications between the Coast Guard and other government agencies, including the Department of Justice, Navy, Civil Defense, Honolulu Police and Fire departments and the Federal Fire Department.

Formed in May 2001, Loea was built on parent-company research spun off from 1990s contracts with the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, now the Missile Defense Agency. An early goal was to set up laser communications between Haleakala and the high-technology research park in Kihei. But lasers — sometimes called “free-space optics” to differentiate them from fiber optics, in which light travels in a cable — work best in clear weather.

Frequent clouds around the 10,023-foot-high Haleakala summit made lasers impractical because the beams are easily scattered by atmospheric water vapor, much as a cloud splits the sun’s reflection into a rainbow. So Trex scientists explored a new area of the electromagnetic spectrum. What they found, they hope, is a pot o’ gold.

Millimeter-wave radio occupies bandwidths shorter than shortwave radio but longer than microwaves and infrared waves, the signature of heat. “In December 2001 we set up a 1-gigabit-per-second link from the rooftop of the Maui research and technology center up to a radio tower on Haleakala, 10 miles as the crow flies,” recalls John Lovberg, chief technology officer for Loea. “Laser technology would not have been able to do the link, but millimeter-wave radio was able to do the link at the same data rate. We then went to the FCC and asked for the spectrum to do this commercially.”

The FCC, after its usual public-comment process, approved in January 2004 the bandwidths of 71 to 76 gigahertz and 81 to 86 gigahertz, one used for transmitting and the other for receiving. Those parameters will be fully met in the second-generation Loea 2500 commercial radio, currently undergoing final testing, said Scharre.

“The whole driver for this technology is the fact that if you look at private enterprises or government or educational customers that need high-speed access, only a fraction of those are sitting on a fiber network,” he said. “This is a way to solve that last-mile bottleneck problem. Most customers who need it are within a mile or two of fiber, but they are not sitting on it. So I don’t see a vertical takeoff in the market, but over the years I see a very large market, and we are the first guys out there.

“Loea’s success is noted in the just-out summer issue of the Missile Defense Agency newsletter. While the original focus of the research was improving airborne and satellite communications, possible future uses include real-time airborne surveillance, the newsletter says. With Loea technology, for instance, a reconnaissance plane or helicopter could download its data immediately to ground crews fighting a brush fire.

by Adam Gruen

Move over free-space optics. There’s a new entrant in the field of wireless high-speed broadband telecommunications. It’s not just fiber optics without the fiber; it’s laser communications without the laser.

The new technology is called advanced millimeter-wave radio, and it may fill an important market niche in-between fiber optics and free-space optics. Trex Enterprises Corporation (San Diego, CA) created Loea Corporation based in Kihei, Maui, to develop, build, and install transmitter-receivers (transceivers) that can exchange 1.25 Gigabits per second (Gbps) at distances of up to 1.75 kilo-meters. The Loea 2000 Series Radio transmission ignores fog and clouds in a way that laser beams cannot, which makes it potentially ideal for airborne, shipborne, and island-based high-speed data exchange.

The missile defense program has fostered advanced millimeter-wave radio communications in many ways. Not only is MDA funding Trex to improve the existing technology to higher data rates of 2.5 Gbps and perhaps even 10 Gbps, but also its predecessor, BMDO, funded research and development on critical components as far back as the early 1990s. The original intent was to improve speed and capacity for airborne and satellite communications.

When the company was known as Thermo Electron Technologies Corporation and later ThermoTrex

Corporation, BMDO awarded a series of Innovative Science & Technology contracts to ThermoTrex to develop laser communications systems that could transmit sound and video at data rates of up to 1.2 Gbps over a distance of approximately 50 kilometers. ThermoTrex demonstrated a system in October 1994 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Observatory and subsequently again in September 1995 in a 150-kilometer mountain-to-mountain test between two Hawaiian islands. ThermoTrex created a new division called Trex Communications in the hopes of commercializing the laser communications technology.

Beginning in 1995, the Army Research Laboratory funded ThermoTrex to develop imaging technology using passive millimeter-wave imaging in the 70 to 100 GHz frequency range. Millimeter-wave imaging occupies a middle ground between infrared imaging (at a shorter wavelength) and short-wave radio imaging (at the longer wavelength). The engineering expertise to design, construct, and test low-noise power amplifiers and other componentry was a springboard fo

r work on the radio transceiver. Since 2002, MDA Advanced Systems has funded refinements of millimeter-wave communications devices, improving data rates from 1.25 Gbps to 2.5 Gbps.

Cutting through the clouds
In 2000, employees of the research and development division of ThermoTrex Corporation decided to spin off as an independent company called Trex Enterprises Corporation, headquartered in San Diego. It was also at that point that they decided to concentrate on advanced millimeter-wave communications. Loea Corporation was formed in May 2001.

Advanced millimeter-wave communications works much as free-space optical communications, but with an important difference: radio sends signals through clouds and fog. Lasers are very good for high-speed communications but they have a drawback: laser beams are attenuated (scattered) by dust, atmospheric disturbances, mist, fog, and clouds. There are ways around all of these problems, but at reduced range or decreased availability. Some laser communications systems rely on radio backup.
The advanced millimeter-wave radio technology had advanced to the point that Trex designers thought it could serve admirably as a mainstay and not merely a backup. The added advantage was that millimeter-wave radio signals would not be scattered by clouds or heavy fog. And above frequencies of 60 GHz, the transmissions would not be absorbed by oxygen in the atmosphere.

From a regulatory point of view, this was a new (“unlicensed”) spectrum. Nobody had ever tried to transmit such extremely short-wave radio frequencies commercially. Working with Loea Corporation, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initially decided to issue Special Temporary Authority permits so that the company could install and operate equipment. In January 2004, the FCC formalized its rules and today the 71 to 76 and 81 to 86 GHz bands are licensed. Loea has installed more than half a dozen working systems for U.S. government customers such as the Coast Guard as well as with commercial partners such as Electronic Data Systems and customers such as the Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology. *B6* The typical Loea transceiver has an antenna dish measuring anywhere from 2 to 4 feet wide, uses about 40 watts of power requiring only a standard 110-volt AC input power source, and connects with a standard telecommunications network. In fact, the company has completed testing of a standard network management protocol interface, so the equipment is compatible with software tools used for monitoring the status of a network. But the best news of all may be the price, which is far less than the cost of deployed fiber-optic cable and reasonably competitive with free-space optic systems: about $60,000 for a pair of transceivers, with an additional $20,000 to $40,000 installation cost.

Advanced millimeter-wave radios could be used for any broadband communications network requiring rapid deployment, redundancy, or mobility—characteristics typical of free-space optical equipment. This includes point-to-point high-speed data transmission for points that are remote or impractically accessible such as islands, oil-drilling platforms, and ships.

Another intriguing application, one that has significance to homeland security and fire fighting, is real-time geospatial airborne surveillance. In fact, the Office of Domestic Preparedness funded Trex, in partnership with Earthdata and Raytheon, to investigate means of providing an airborne wireless link that would relay high-quality infrared images in real time to a ground-based command center for analysis. The feasibility of such a link, with obvious implications for the battlefield, was demonstrated in February 2005.

Northrop Grumman has signed a licensing agreement with Trex Enterprises to integrate the celestial navigation technology into precision targeting systems provided to the US military and allied forces.

As part of the agreement, Northrop will produce and integrate the celestial navigation capability into ground targeting systems that offer greater accuracy to soldiers during location of targets.

Trex has already developed and matured the core technology to offer a highly accurate celestial navigation subsystem for use in military products and other scientific applications.

Northrop Grumman’s Laser Systems business unit vice-president and general manager, Gordon Stewart, said the integration of celestial navigation technology represents a significant milestone on the precision targeting technology roadmap.

“We will continue to refine and grow the application of celestial navigation for precision targeting across our production laser systems for US and coalition warfighters,” Stewart said.

Trex Enterprises chairman and CEO Ken Tang said the company will partner with Northrop to further advance and mature its celestial navigation technologies and products.

“The synergy between Trex research and development expertise and Northrop Grumman engineering and production capability will surely increase and accelerate benefits to our soldiers,” Tang said.

Having successfully completed formal qualification for its ground soldier targeting system with the celestial navigation enhancement, Northrop is currently delivering systems to support the immediate requirements of deployed warfighters.

Northrop Grumman Laser Systems has to date deployed thousands of portable, lightweight targeting and laser systems, including electro-optical (EO) imaging / ranging systems for target location, laser designators / markers for precise guidance of smart munitions, for ground troops and vehicles.

In addition, the company has installed airborne laser rangefinders and designators onboard several sophisticated manned and unmanned aircraft platforms worldwide.

Original Article

Image: A team of scientists and engineers from Trex Enterprises and the University of Illinois watch as Trex tests a radar device mounted on a pickup while on the runway at McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad on Tuesday. The purpose of the device is to locate and pick up small pieces of debris that damage aircraft during take-offs and landings. (Photo by Hayne Palmour IV – Staff photographer) 

CARLSBAD —- Stumble over a rock or a piece of junk on the sidewalk, and you might fall. But if an aircraft hits such debris, the consequences can be far more serious —- the 2000 fatal crash of the supersonic Concorde jet in Paris was blamed on metal lying on a runway. So airport employees regularly inspect the runways to make sure they’re clear of such debris. San Diego-based Trex Enterprises Corp. says it offers a better way than the human eye to find and remove this dangerous junk.

They’ve adapted a military technology that uses millimeter-length radio waves to identify what the aviation industry calls “foreign object debris,” and then remove it. Trex is testing its system at McClellan-Palomar Airport. This week, officials from the Federal Aviation Administration dropped by to see the system in action. By tracking and removing debris that can damage aircraft, Trex’s system can improve safety and lower aircraft insurance rates, said Grant Bishop, chief operations officer of Trex Aviation Corp., a subsidiary of the company.

Called FOD Finder, the truck-mounted system not only locates the debris, but also vacuums it up, Bishop said. The waves have one-tenth the energy of a cell phone’s radiation, he said. The military uses this technology to detect such obstacles as wires in the air that could entangle helicopters, said Bishop, a former commander of the U.S. Air Force’s 4th Fighter Squadron. Bishop flew F-16s and served in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

On the ground, the debris threatening aircraft can be just about anything —- lost tools, pavement fragments, gas caps or broken aircraft parts. For example, the Concorde passenger jet crash, which killed all 109 people on board, was caused by a metal strip that had fallen from another aircraft, according to a French investigation. Willie Vasquez, manager of Palomar Airport, said he’s impressed with what he has seen of Trex’s system. Large airports such as Los Angeles International Airport are most in need of improved debris detection, he said. “They (LAX) probably do 10 inspections a day,” Vasquez said. “Right now, it’s all done by the human eye, and these guys don’t have a lot of time in between all the flights. But this thing doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t matter whether it’s day or night.” Trex has been testing its system at Palomar Airport for months before the FAA visit this week to verify its accuracy, Bishop said. The airport is convenient and logistically easier to work from than the far-busier San Diego International Airport. Meanwhile, McClellan-Palomar is completing major upgrades visible to anyone who hasn’t been to the airport recently. These include a new building housing a gate for a startup service, California Pacific Airlines, preparing to begin operations as early as November. Vasquez said he’s showing the airport’s upgrades to other potential customers. On Tuesday morning, for example, he hosted a visit from Frontier Airlines.

Improved safety from Trex’s system, which costs $400,000, can make the airport even more desirable, Bishop said.
If Palomar Airport buys it, “they’re going to have one of the most advanced systems out here, saving people money and keeping them safe.” The FAA is testing three other types of detection systems, but Trex’s is the only one made in the United States, Bishop said. The others are made by companies in Britain, Israel and Singapore. Edwin E. Herricks, leader of the FAA’s performance assessment, said the others are based in fixed locations, at a tower, and scan the runways from the tower. Trex’s FOD Finder is the only mobile system being tested. The agency’s assessment should be done by the fall, said Herricks, coordinator of airport safety management at the Center for Excellence for Airport Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Airports can then decide which debris-detection system to buy. The agency has left the decision up to each airport.
Trex also makes fixed-base and transportable FOD detectors, Bishop said. The transportable system is similar to the fixed system, but can be moved from one location to another. Airports aren’t being told which system to choose, Bishop said, but the FAA has a “buy-American” policy, including financial incentives.

Contact Trex Enterprises at www.trexenterprises.com or call 858-646-5553.

Call staff writer Bradley J. Fikes at 760-739-6641.
Read his blogs at bizblogs.nctimes.com.