On The NAB Exhibit Floor: GatesAir

GatesAir | Booth N2613 | Website: http://www.gatesair.com/

GatesAir will showcase a new high-efficiency UHF transmitter range to help broadcasters leverage the new business opportunities promised through the spectrum repack and the ATSC 3.0 DTV standard. The new Maxiva ULXTE liquid transmitter joins the recently-announced UAXTE air-cooled transmitter to give broadcasters two design options with market-leading RF performance and the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership.  

The ULXTE and UAXTE are optimized for channel changes driven by the Spectrum Repack, thanks to next-generation power amplifiers that increase peak power capacity for all ATSC and OFDM waveforms. This design strategy, based on GatesAir’s PowerSmart Plus architecture with broadband amplification, accelerates manufacturing and delivery by simplifying channel tuning; and increases power density for all modulations. Its high-efficiency power amplifiers and market-leading power density also provides equal power levels for ATSC 1.0 and 3.0, and reduces costs, energy consumption and internal parts to streamline maintenance. In fact, the slimmed-down architecture, reducing footprint and weight, makes single-engineer maintenance a reality—and an ongoing OPEX benefit—for networks and broadcasters with limited RF engineering resources.

Both transmitters integrate GatesAir’s state-of-the-art XTE exciter to ensure a clear path to ATSC 3.0. Featuring a software-defined modulator, the XTE includes native IP inputs and eliminates the need to retrofit transmitters with additional gear to enable network connectivity, giving broadcasters an out-of-the-box solution to simplify the input and output of multimedia services via a local- or wide-area IP network. The design provides a direct gateway to the enhanced multichannel DTV, mobile broadcast and streaming opportunities of ATSC 3.0, and centralizes advanced IP-based monitoring and control to a single user interface. Both transmitters are also easily adaptable to single-frequency network (SFN) architectures that are expected to become common in ATSC 3.0 deployments.

Beyond ATSC 3.0, the ULXTE and UAXTE instantly adapt to global DTV standards, with seamless migration to DVB-T, DVB-T2 and ISDB-T thanks to the software-defined modulation of the XTE. The XTE-driven modulation further reduces costs and power consumption by lowering wattage requirements at the amplification stage, without affecting the same signal strength. Its inherent GatesAir RTAC (real-time adaptive correction) software also strengthens signal correction at the amplification stage to optimize performance and regulatory compliance. 

The ULXTE is available in power levels from 1.2 kW to 150 kW on all modulations, while the UAXTE is available in power levels from 20 W to 20 kW on all modulations. Both models offer industry-leading system efficiency levels up to 45%. Both transmitters and the XTE are made in the USA at GatesAir’s Quincy, Ill., manufacturing center.

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