Wireless Profile

Article reprinted from Wireless Magazine.

Ever wonder how your pager finds you, no matter where you are? You can go from county to county, city to city and your trusty pager will always find you. The answer is simple: Timing. Enter the "smart antenna"; a combined high performance GPS receiver and antenna communicating through a serial interface and providing a PPS output. Smart antennas in cellular base stations are placed throughout a service area to synchronize the pager sites to precisely the same time. All pager sites then send out the message to your pager. No matter where you are, you get beeped. Now, imagine if they were not synchronized. You'd get paged once, then again, then again, until all the signals were received by your pager from every transmitter in your service area. As you can see, accurate timing and strong receiving capability are essential to the cellular and pager networks of today's wireless community.

The same idea works for interactive television, radio and cellular networks. Getting the message across these days means a lot more than being understood. It means synchronizing high-tech equipment to facilitate a variety of timing applications in a rapidly growing market. With the recent expansion of data and wireless communication networks, GPS receivers are replacing older and less reliable timing technologies.

Trimble is the leading supplier of GPS timing modules and smart antennas. A leader in the emerging markets for GPS communication data products, Trimble has recognized the continuing need to develop products and technologies for the wireless world. Trimble holds more patents on GPS technology than any other organization, including a patent for the world's first GPS smart antenna.

Not limited to telecommunications or the wireless infrastructure, applications for timing products are rapidly expanding. In fact, Trimble has their hands in some of the world's most exciting and powerful businesses. Hollywood recently incorporated Trimble GPS in their movie slates, allowing for unparalleled control of audio and video data, as well as multi-camera sequencing. In the world of high finance, major investment banks are using GPS to synchronize network computers located around the world. Now, activities in London, New York and Tokyo offices are recorded simultaneously.

Trimble works closely with the leading suppliers of telecommunication equipment and providers of high speed paging services. Relationships with these major contributors to the wireless community enable Trimble to push the creative limits of our in-house R & D staff. In turn, our technological advancements strongly position us at the forefront of this new and emerging market, and place us in the driver's seat of the telecommunication future. It also states a well-known fact that our products and technologies can maintain a high level of precision and reliability even in the harshest of environments found at our customer's wireless transmitter sites. Delivering this level of performance ensures Trimble's continuing advancements in the communication networks of the future.